Test Yourself: Psychologists Created a Quiz to Define Your Sense of Humor

Photograph: George Marks/Getty Images

In 1979, a New York Post editor past the name of Norman Cousins published a memoir called Beefcake of an Illness. The book, which described how Cousins used laughter to help him recover from an ill-divers disorder, was a smash hit, and did quite a bit to further the thought of humour every bit a panacea. It'due south a notion that persists today, and not just in clichés ("laughter is the best medicine"); when you have a especially awful day, it's natural to reach for a comedy or seek out an excuse for laughs as a selection-me-up.

But that's not quite correct: Humor isn't an unqualified good, and a psychology researcher named Rod Martin, who recently retired from the University of Western Ontario, has dedicated his career to proving it. Martin was just starting out in the field when Cousins published his book; Intrigued by its message, he decided to investigate its scientific merit — but before he could do that, he had to figure out how to measure humor, an amorphous, multifaceted concept, in a scientific fashion.

At the time, humour research was considered a fringe interest in psychology. Attempts to study sense of humour looked less like scientific measurements and more than like BuzzFeed quizzes: Researchers would present people with a series of jokes and cartoons and ask them which ones they institute funny, assuming that the answers would reveal something near the respondent's personality. The problem was, these studies failed to find a human relationship between personality and taste in jokes. Self-reports of humor, meanwhile, are notoriously unreliable (everyone thinks they accept a good sense of sense of humour, and at least some of them have to be wrong).

Martin took a dissimilar tactic: Modeling his approach after recently developed tests to measure feet, he focused not on the jokes themselves, but on how respondents used humour in everyday life. The finish result would become his signature piece of work: the Humor Styles Questionnaire, the first scientifically validated measure of humour. In 2003, Martin and his colleagues published the HSQ in the Journal of Research in Personality; today, it'due south in common employ all over the world.

The HSQ divides humor into four primary styles: Affiliative, Self-Enhancing, Aggressive, and Self-Defeating. Affiliative humor means corking jokes, engaging in barrack, and otherwise using humor to make others like us. Cocky-enhancing humor is an optimistic, coping humour, characterized by the ability to laugh at yourself or at the absurdity of a situation and feel better every bit a result. Aggressive sense of humour is characterized by sarcasm, teasing, criticism, and ridicule. Self-defeating sense of humor is attempting to get others to like us by putting ourselves downward. See for yourself which category best describes your own sense of humor (though it's important to note that the lines betwixt humor styles aren't hard and fast, notwithstanding, nor are the categories mutually exclusive — everyone's individual sense of sense of humour is a unique combination of all iv styles).

What'due south Your Humour?

"Individual differences in uses of sense of humour and their relation to psychological well-being: Evolution of the Humor Styles Questionnaire," Journal of Research in Personality

Different his predecessors, Martin did detect a link between certain humor styles and certain traits: Affiliative and cocky-enhancing humor are linked to extraversion and openness to new experiences, and self-defeating sense of humour to neuroticism. Affiliative and self-enhancing humor are also generally adaptive, both correlated with greater mental well-being, while aggressive and self-defeating humor are generally maladaptive. There are enough of exceptions, though: Aggressive and self-defeating jokes can be fine and even beneficial when used sparingly and in the correct context. Likewise, even affiliative and self-enhancing humor tin can become maladaptive when used in excess. "Some people are always laughing and joking equally a way of avoiding issues," Martin says.

"Information technology's really the style nosotros apply humor that is almost important," he adds. "Not and then much how funny yous are, but how yous use humor in advancing relationships or in detrimental ways."

This may be the central to understanding humour's relationship to well-being: It's all in how you lot wield it. Someone who goes overboard with aggressive humor, for example, may feel better about themselves in the short term by putting other people downwards. But sooner or later, they may discover people pulling away for fear of becoming a target; eventually, their relationships may deteriorate, forth with their psychological well-being. In one 2014 report led by Sara Caird, a graduate pupil of Martin'due south, couples who reported using more aggressive humor too had lower relationship satisfaction; on the flip side, when people engaged in more affiliative and adaptive humor with their partners, they experienced a greater sense of intimacy and reported more positive and less negative moods.

Then if humor doesn't primarily serve to promote psychological well-existence, what does it practice? "I think it primarily has a social function." Martin says. "From an evolutionary perspective, we evolved as a social animal. We needed other people to survive. And so annihilation that tin can raise the cohesiveness of groups of people was adaptive," even when that cohesion came at the expense of outsiders: "Sense of humor is a very aggressive thing," he adds. "You're laughing with your friends, at your enemies. In that location's aspects of that I think can be maladaptive in the hither and now that might have been adaptive in 1 time." Humor was never a panacea, but it is a powerful tool — one that can be used for positive purposes, simply only if you so choose.

Psychologists Created a Quiz to Define Your Sense of Sense of humour