Humor styles and the ten personality dimensions from the Supernumerary Personality Inventory

Abstract

BackgroundThe present study examines the relationship between humor styles and the 10 Supernumerary Personality Invento-ry (SPI) traits to understand how humor styles correlate with personality dimensions “beyond the Big Five” model. Humor styles and the personality dimensions of the SPI have yet to be explored. Therefore, the aim of this study is to explore how humor styles correlate with traits outside of conventional personality models, in order to better un-derstand humor expression related to personality traits.Participants and procedureThe data were from 693 adult participants (135 men and 560 women) from North America.ResultsAll four humor styles positively correlated with the SPI humorousness scale. The two positive humor styles, affiliative and self-enhancing, had significant positive correlations with the egotism SPI scale. The two negative humor styles, aggressive and self-defeating, had significant positive correlations with the SPI scales of seductiveness and manipu-lativeness and significant negative correlations with the integrity scale from the SPI. A sub-group of the sample (n = 471) also completed a Big Five personality measure. For this sample, the variance due to the Big Five was re-gressed out of the SPI scales.ConclusionsThe correlations between the SPI residuals and the humor style scores decreased from the unaltered SPI scale scores except for the aggressive humor style correlations, which were less affected, suggesting that this dimension of humor may have some variance “beyond” the Big Five.