The Situational Humor Response Questionnaire (SHRQ) and Coping Humor Scale (CHS): A decade of research findings

Abstract

The Situational Humor Response Questionnaire (SHRQ) and the Coping Humor Scale (CHS) are self-report measures of different aspects of the sense of humor that were developed in the context of an investigation of the stress-moderating effects of humor. The SHRQ assesses the degree to which subjects laugh and smile in a wide variety of situations, and the CHS measures the degree to which respondents make use of humor in coping with stress in their lives. Both scales have been translated into more than 10 languages, and a fairly large body of research findings has accumulated, providing evidence for the reliability and construct validity of these measures. This article reviews research on these scales with regard to (1) the stressmoderator hypothesis, (2) correlations with coping-related variables, and (3) the factor space occupied by the measures. The paper addresses the range of usefulness of both measures, as well as their limitations as measures of sense of humor.