OBJECTIVE Humor has been shown to decrease the use of pain medicine, improve mood, and decrease stress. However, the timing and setting for using humor can be perceived differently depending on the patient and the context. Our objective was to better understand how patients with recurrent ovarian cancer experience humor to gain insight into the feasibility of using humor as a therapeutic adjunc...

The present paper tries to discover the position of sense of humor in personality space. Several definitions of humor are discussed and a review of studies relating personality and humor is given. The authors’ conceptualization of humor is introduced and two studies are presented that tried to locate these humor dimensions within personality space. Our humor tests were given to two samples: the...

The present study examines the cross-national stability ofafactor analytically derived taxonomy ofjokes and cartoons. A sample oflOOfemale and 48 male Italian adults responded to Italian translations ofthe 3 WD humor test (Ruch 1983) which is aimed at measuring funniness and aversiveness of incongruity-resolution, nonsense, and sexual humor. The results were compared with that of a German sampl...

This article considers how humor may fit within a resiliency perspective. Following a brief overview of resiliency approaches, including selected work on positive psychology, several lines of research that provide initial support for resiliency effects of humor on stress and trauma are highlighted. This work ranges from anecdotal case report descriptions of facilitative humor use in extremely t...

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To describe patients' perspectives concerning the use of humor in their care and recovery. DESIGN Descriptive. SETTING Community-based. SAMPLE Nine women with a diagnosis of breast cancer. METHODS Open-ended interviews were conducted with participants to identify their use of humor, its influence on spirituality, and their perceptions of how nurses use humor in caring...

Two experiments concerning humor in teaching and learning in higher education are presented. The first study used relevant humor in a one-semester statistics course in an experimental group and no humor in a control group. One hundred sixty-one students participated, and the results showed significant differences between the two groups in favor of the group learning with humor. No significant s...

The appreciation of humor is a universal phenomenon and a key aspect of cognition. It has been studied in the context of jokes, where the incongruity in expected and observed context results in the perception of humor. The present study examines how the humor appreciation of single words relates to the humor of the whole joke – is a joke simply a sum of its parts? Using a novel dataset of singl...

Humor and mental health are interconnected as is evidenced by a large number of studies. However, associations are only small and inconsistent as the operationalization of humor poses a methodological challenge. The Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ) differentiates four humor styles that might be beneficial or harmful to mental health. The aim of the present study was to meta-analytically aggrega...