The relationship between humour types, assertiveness, self-efficacy, personality, and perfectionism in pre-service teachers

Abstract

Teachers’ humour has a special place in the educational context with multiple benefits for themselves and their students. As a complex concept, humour is strongly related to individual personality, which is also complex and diverse. The current research aimed to investigate the correlations between four types of humour (affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and self-defeating) and assertiveness, perfectionism, and Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability) in pre-service teachers. The obtained results show that the adaptive type of humour (affiliative and self-enhancing) positively correlated with assertiveness, Big Five personality traits, and the adaptive form of perfectionism, and negatively with the maladaptive form of perfectionism. Also, the maladaptive type of humour (aggressive and self-defeating) negatively correlated with assertiveness, Big Five personality traits, and positively with the maladaptive form of perfectionism. An intriguing finding was the positive correlation between aggressive humour and assertiveness.