Effects of Two-dimensional Self-directed Humor on State Anxiety: A Vignette Experiment

Ryota Tsukawaki, Tomoya Imura, Makoto Hirakawa and Katsuhiro Ito

SAGE Open, 2024, vol. 14, issue 2, 21582440241256528

Abstract: Correlational studies have suggested that self-directed humor (SDH) has positive and negative dimensions, namely deleterious and benign SDH, that have opposite functions on psychological well-being. Therefore, this study conducts two vignette experiments to test the causal relationships between deleterious SDH and increased state anxiety and between benign SDH and decreased state anxiety in stressful situations involving exclusion by others. In Experiment 1, college students were instructed to imagine they used deleterious or benign SDH after being ostracized by others. Participants in the control condition only imagined that they had been excluded by others. As a result, participants in the benign SDH condition reported lower levels of state anxiety than participants in the control condition. This result was replicated in Experiment 2 for working adults. Overall, the experimental results support a causal model indicating that benign SDH positively affects psychological well-being, supporting and extending the results of correlational studies.

Keywords: self-directed humor; self-defeating humor; psychological well-being; state anxiety; humor styles (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21582440241256528 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:sagope:v:14:y:2024:i:2:p:21582440241256528

DOI: 10.1177/21582440241256528

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in SAGE Open
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().