Abstract
Previous research has shown that humor and self-presentation are linked in several ways. With regard to individual differences, it turned out that gelotophilia (the joy of being laughed at) and katagelasticism (the joy of laughing at others) are substantially associated with the histrionic self-presentation style that is characterized by performing explicit As-If-behaviors (e.g., irony, parodying others) in everyday interactions. By contrast, gelotophobia (the fear of being laughed at) shows a negative correlation with histrionic self-presentation. In order to further contribute to the nomological network, we have explored whether the three dispositions toward ridicule and laughter as well as histrionic self-presentation are related to humor creation abilities. In doing so, we have assessed the four constructs in a study with 337 participants that also completed the Cartoon Punch line Production Test (CPPT, Köhler and Ruch, 1993, unpublished). In the CPPT, subjects were asked to generate as many funny punch lines as possible for six caption-removed cartoons. The created punch lines were then analyzed with regard to quantitative (e.g., number of punch lines) and qualitative (e.g., wittiness of the punch lines and overall wittiness of the person as evaluated by three independent raters) humor creation abilities. Results show that both gelotophilia and histrionic self-presentation were positively correlated with quantitative and qualitative humor creation abilities. By contrast, gelotophobia showed slightly negative and katagelasticism no associations with the assessed humor creation abilities. These findings especially apply to the subgroup of participants that created punch lines for each of the six cartoons and partly replicate and extend the results of a previous study by Ruch et al. (2009). Altogether, the results of our study show that individual differences in humor-related traits are associated with the quantity and quality of humorous punch lines. It is argued that behavior-related or performative humor creation tasks should be considered in addition to the CPPT in order to open up new avenues that can cross-fertilize research on individual differences in humor and self-presentation.
Highlights
Since the introduction of gelotophobia, gelotophilia, and katagelasticism as individual differences variables (Ruch and Proyer, 2009a,b), these dispositions toward ridicule and laughter have attracted considerable research activities
In order to further contribute to their nomological networks, we have explored the differential impact of the three dispositions toward laughter and ridicule and histrionic self-presentation with regard to humor creation abilities as assessed in a performance test
Means and standard deviations for gelotophobia, gelotophilia, and katagelasticism in our sample were quite similar to those reported by Ruch and Proyer (2009a), and men showed higher katagelasticism than women as well
Summary
Since the introduction of gelotophobia, gelotophilia, and katagelasticism as individual differences variables (Ruch and Proyer, 2009a,b), these dispositions toward ridicule and laughter have attracted considerable research activities. Most of the extant studies refer to gelotophobia, the fear of being laughed at (see Ruch et al, 2014 for an overview), that has stimulated crosscultural research (e.g., Proyer et al, 2012b; Kamble et al, 2014) and turned out to be a decisive predictor of bullying (Platt et al, 2009). In the remainder of this introduction, we will explicate why self-presentation and especially the histrionic self-presentation style is related to humor and laughter and adds to the nomological network of gelotophobia, gelotophilia, and katagelasticism. We derive hypotheses regarding the relations of the three dispositions toward ridicule and the histrionic self-presentation style with quantitative and qualitative humor creation abilities
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