Relationships between personality and the everyday use of humor

John B. Nezlek , Peter L. Derks

Abstract

Each day for two weeks participants described how often they had used four types of humor that day: affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and self-defeat-ing humor. Participants also completed the Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ), the Coping with Humor scale (CHS), a measure of the Five Factor Model (FFM) of personality, and the Rosenberg Self-esteem scale (RSE). A series of multilevel analyses (days nested within persons) found that Extraversion was positively related to the frequency of use of all four types of humor, whereas the other factors of the FFM were not related to daily humor use when they were included in analyses with Extraversion. Controlling for the factors of the FFM, self-esteem was negatively related to the daily use of aggressive and self-defeating humor, whereas Coping with Humor was positively related to the daily use of aggressive and self-defeating humor. Although relationships between our measures of the daily use of humor and the FFM, CHS, and RSE were similar to relationships between the HSQ and these measures, there were enough differences to suggest that our daily measures of humor provided insights into the use of humor that complemented and extended the insights provided by dispositional measures such as the HSQ.