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Today, April 16, is Stress Awareness Day, and since we're in the middle of Humor Month and Stress Awareness Month, let's look at how our style of humor might be either helping or hindering our fight against stress. Humor researchers have created a Humor Styles Questionnaire, which classifies humor styles into four different categories:
Affiliative humor: the tendency to tell jokes, make humorous observations, and to say funny things as a way to amuse others, reduce
interpersonal tensions and facilitate
relationships.
Self-enhancing humor: maintaining a
humorous outlook even when alone, being amused
by the incongruities and absurdities in life, keeping one's humor in the face
of stress and adversity and the use of
humor to cope with challenges.
Aggressive humor: the tendency to use
humor to criticize or manipulate other people, including
sarcasm, ridicule, teasing and disparaging humor.
Self-defeating humor: the tendency to
amuse others by saying funny things at your own expense, to use excessively self-disparaging humor, and
to use humor to ingratiate yourself with others. This type of humor is
also used to avoid dealing with problems or issues
in the workplace.
Many people shift between the various
styles depending on their mood and the context. But most people tend to have a predominate
style of humor, and this humor style
will likely impact how psychologically healthy they are. Affiliative and
self-enhancing humor are, as you might guess, considered much healthier forms
of humor and have been positively correlated to lower levels of depression and
anxiety, and higher levels of self-esteem and overall psychological health.
Aggressive and self-defeating humor is associated with higher levels of
hostility, aggression and anxiety. (This makes sense, considering that the term "sarcasm" comes from the Greek word "sarkasmos" which means to "tear at flesh like a dog.")
The research suggests that
the best style of humor of all is self-enhancing humor. People who score high
on self-enhancing humor are less likely to rehash negative past events,
and they tend to be more emotionally healthy. In other words, your workplace needs more Jerry Seinfelds, less Don Rickles.  |
