Relationships between everyday use of humor and daily experience

John Nezlek , Peter L. Derks , John Simanski

Abstract

Each day for two weeks participants described how often they had used four types of humor that day: affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and selfdefeating humor. Each day, participants also described the events that occurred in their lives (positive and negative crossed with social and achievement), and they provided measures of their well-being. Multilevel analyses (days nested within persons) found that the daily use of affiliative and self-enhancing humor was positively related to daily positive events (social and achievement) and was negatively related to daily negative events (social and achievement). In contrast, the use of self-defeating humor was positively related to the occurrence of all types of events. Affiliative and self-enhancing humor was positively related to positively valent measures of well-being (e.g., self-esteem), and were negatively related to negatively valent measures of well-being (e.g., rumination). In contrast, relationships between well-being and the use of self-defeating humor were the mirror image of these relationships. The use of aggressive humor was unrelated to well-being. These results suggest that the use of humor is cued by the events that occur in people’s daily lives, social and achievement and good and bad, and that the use of humor is related to well-being, both positively and negatively.