While a veritable flood of general books on creativity have been released in the past few years (e., it's rare that a text is released that focuses in depth on one particular manifestation of creativity. The Psychology of Humor by Rod A. Martin is such a book, focusing (obviously) on humor. Although not a particularly funny read—though it has its moments—it is a very well-written, well-organize...

This study examined whether, in a community sample of Israeli adults (N = 335), benign (i.e., affiliative and self-enhancing) and injurious (i.e., aggressive and self-defeating) humor styles mediated or moderated the relationship between self-criticism and neediness, two traits that confer vulnerability to depression, on the one hand, and levels of depressive symptoms, on the other. There was n...

In this article some formal, content-related and procedural considerations towards the sense of humor are articulated and the analysis of both everyday humor behavior and of comic styles leads to the initial proposal of a four factormodel of humor (4FMH). This model is tested in a new dataset and it is also examined whether two forms of comic styles (benevolent humor and moral mockery) do fit i...

Historical as well as contemporary writers across many disciplines have referred to humor as a virtue. However, in psychological research it is not clear in which ways humor can serve (as) a virtue, and for which virtues this holds. The current study addresses this issue from the perspective of lay people's everyday lives. The aims of the study are to investigate (1) how often people achieved e...

This study assessed the concurrent and prospective associations between psychosocial adjustment and four humor styles, two of which are adaptive (affiliative, self-enhancing) and two maladaptive (aggressive, self-defeating). Participants were 1,234 adolescents (52% female) aged 11-13 years, drawn from six secondary schools in England. Self-reports of psychosocial adjustment (loneliness, depress...

This study was done to validate the screening tool Home Screening Questionnaire (HSQ) against the gold standard Home Observation for the Measurement of Environment (HOME) inventory, using diagnostic test evaluation. Both HOME inventory and HSQ were administered by separate observers, with children less than 3 years of age, among 200 families belonging to 14 anganwadi areas. There was a high sen...

The aim of the present study was to better understand humor in individuals with Asperger’s syndrome. Therefore, various humor and laughter related phenomena were investigated by means of various standardized humor instruments. Forty individuals with AS and 113 controls filled out several self-report questionnaires and tests. The results revealed that individuals with AS scored significantly low...