Sense of humor as a moderator of the relation between stressors and moods.

Abstract

Three studies are reported that investigated the hypothesis, long held by theorists, therapists, and laypersons alike, that sense of humor reduces the deleterious impact of stressful experiences. In each study negative-life-events checklist was used to predict stress scores on measure of mood disturbance. These studies made use of different measures of subjects' sense of humor, including four selfreport scales and two behavioral assessments of subjects' ability to produce humor under nonstressful and mildly stressful conditions. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that five of the six humor measures produced significant moderating effect on the relation between negative life events and mood disturbance. Subjects with low humor scores obtained higher correlations between these two variables than did those with high humor scores. These results provide initial evidence for the stress-buffering role of humor. The notion that humor possesses therapeutic properties has long enjoyed popular support. This idea can be traced at least as far back as the ancient biblical maxim that a merry heart doeth good like medicine (Proverbs 17:22), and it has gained recent support from the account of Norman Cousins's (1979) recovery from serious collagen disea.se through massive doses of laughter and vitamin C. Recently, Dixon (1980) cogently argued that humor may have evolved as uniquely human strategy for coping with stress.