Putting a spotlight on daily humor behaviors: Dimensionality and relationships with personality, subjective well-being, and humor styles

Abstract

Although psychological humor research has expanded in the last decades, the humor behaviors that people show in their everyday lives are still poorly understood. To fill this gap, this diary study explores the dimensionality of 45 daily humor behaviors and their relationships with the Big Five personality traits and subjective well-being. Furthermore, the humor behaviors were utilized to investigate the criterion validity of the Humor Styles Questionnaire. A hierarchical factor analysis of the humor behaviors (N = 123) revealed seven dimensions: Cheerful, witty, deriding, amused, sarcastic, self-directed, and canned. These humor behavior dimensions correlated with emotional stability, extraversion, lower agreeableness, and culture/openness. Also cheerful, amused, and self-directed humor behaviors correlated positively with subjective well-being, even when personality and the humor styles were controlled for. The criterion correlations of the humor styles to their constituting humor behaviors were medium to large for affiliative and self-enhancing, and small to medium for aggressive and self-defeating. Overall, investigating humor behaviors seems a promising venue for future research and applications of individual differences in humor.