A social -cognitive assessment of humor

The focus of current humor research is on inter-individual variation in humorous behaviors and their relation to inter-individual variation in outcomes such as health and well-being. Though the assessment of gross-level humorous behaviors and their outcomes can be useful, one might instead wish to assess the cognitive processes that lead individuals to use humor in the first place---an approach that requires the measurement of intra-individual variability in humor. In this study, a methodology outlined in Cervone's (2004) Knowledge-and-Appraisal Architecture (KAPA), was applied to assess the social-cognitive processes that contribute to the use of humor. Individuals participated in three sessions. In the first, their beliefs about why they use humor were assessed idiographically and nomothetically. They then rated the relevance of these beliefs to a set of 53 social situations. In session two, they rated the relevance of their idiographically-identified reasons to the set of social situations and rated their likelihood of using humor in the same situations. The tasks of session three were largely the same as those in session 1, to test the stability of participants' patterns of intra-individual variability. As predicted, participants' patterns of variability in their beliefs about the relevance of the situations to the reasons they use humor were stable across two testing periods. These patterns were stable regardless of the level of schematicity of the reasons, attesting to the reliability of the measure. The validity of the measure was supported by the finding that participants' use of humor varied as a function of their beliefs about the situational relevance to their idiographically-, but not nomothetically-identified reasons for using humor. The implications of these findings for humor assessment are discussed.