When referring to humour, one instantly thinks about the times shared with friends, colleagues or family including ridiculous incidents or funny moments. Nevertheless humour is a more complex concept than merely social interaction, for example to hide displays of weakness or show allegiance thus serving various different functions than at first glance assumed.
Humour can be also used as a method for regulating emotions such as a coping strategy (Freud, 1928). There are four major approaches for how humour could be regarded as a regulating process to aid in dealing with negative emotions. Firstly Strick et al. (2009) suggest that attentional capabilities are necessary for humour to occur thus the focus is shifted and the resources, which are left for processing negative emotions, decrease; whereas Fredrickson & Levenson (1998) argue that positive emotions revoke negative emotions. Keltner & Bonnano (1997) state a different approach as they suggest that humour allows the perspective of a situation to be viewed from remoteness, allowing people to distance themselves from the negativity. This is similar to Vaillant (2000) who implies that through humour a situation can be evaluated from a different perspective and alters the emotional feedback in order to cope better.
This research is especially relevant for people who deal with tragic situations on a regular basis such as emergency workers, disaster workers, social workers, nurses, etc. Rubin (1990) found that people working in high stress environments are likely to reduce their levels of stress through the use of humour, especially gallows humour that mocks the personal circumstances of a situation. However gallows humour is a short-term method of coping as the distance created does not allow actual handling and can be counterproductive for example in therapeutic setting (Crabbs, Crabbs, & Goodman, 1986).
One does not have to involved at the place where a tragedy or disaster occurred to be affected by stress related symptoms (Davidhizar & Shearer, 2002). For example a few months after Sept. 11 attacks, a poll released from Schuster et al. (2001) displayed 33% of children and 44 % of the adult population showed symptoms induced from high stress. Through social media, disaster jokes were publicised (Nilsen, 1993) and were used as a method for coping and social bonding so to emotionally distance them from the occurrence.
Another function of humour is related to increasing emotional well-being such as seen with mental health in therapeutic use as in positive psychology. However when humour is wrongly applied such wrong timing, too frequently, or hostile manner it can be self-defeating for the patient and there is a high risk of relapse when (Kubie, 1970). Frederickson et al. (2001) created the Broaden and Build Model, which suggests that through consistent experience, for example a daily basis, of positive emotions in the form of humour, the reserves for coping are broadened and lead to more enhance emotional welfare (Fredrickson & Joiner, 2002). Hence the more positive emotions are experienced, over a period of time people will be then able to deal with contingencies better as their attitudes for handling a situation will be more optimistic in their views (Fredrickson et al., 2003). So being humorous on a regular basis can also have a positive impact on health.
Although different styles of humour have to be taken into account as people differ in their sense of humour. Samson and Gross (2012) tested the effects of positive and negative humour such as dark vs. innocent humour and hypothesized that positive humour would be more successful at promoting positive and decreasing negative emotions. The results were based on Vaillant’s (2000) approach of coping and showed a significant difference between positive and negative humour confirming the hypothesis. Negative humour is indicated to be better in creating an emotional distance in comparison to positive humour.
Although there are many positive aspects of humour in regards of emotional well-being and coping, there are some studies showing mixed results regarding humour. For example, Dorz et al. (2003) showed rather than an uplifting effect it had the opposite effect concerning stress and depression. Also that even when humour was shown to increase mood it did not have any long-term effects on mental health or emotional well being (Gelkopf et al., 2003). The limitation of the studies testing humour was looking at the correlation rather than at cause and effect.
Overall the research of humour highlights to be an effective mechanism for coping in a stress based environment as well as helping to increase emotional well being, however it should not be used irresponsible and in a non-destructive manner. It is important to research the effects of the different types of humour in order to understand how it can be incorporated as a useful tool to support underlying treatment to cope for example with stress and trauma. However more research needs to be invested to properly understand long-term effects and further uses of humour.
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