Humor Style,Dispositional Optimism And Mental Health

The issues of university students'mental health have being attached great importance by people from all works of life because it relates not only to undergraduates'abilities but also to the whole national qualities and the development of our country. Besides, college days is one of the most important period for college students to grow. during this period, university students are gradually maturing but not really mature and they have active and strong varying thought, meanwhile, they are under pressure from adapting to the new school, learning ,finding job , social interaction and always worried and anxious so that they have some problem in mental health. According to the situation and education of undergraduates'mental health, we can see that university students not only need others'help but also need themselves'help.As was proved by many researches, humor is beneficial to people's physical and mental health, the different ingredient of humor affect people's health in different way so if people can not only treat humor in a right way but also appreciate humor and use the positive humor styles in daily life, humor will be a approach to improve college students'psychological health and will definitely be good to their health. It is a hot topic for many foreign researchers to examine the relationship between humor, personality and mental health. Many studies proved that there is correlation between humor and optimism and they both related closely to mental health but no researcher put humor and optimism together to find out the effect of them to mental health, so this paper focuses on finding out the relationship between mental health, humor styles and dispositional optimism.The current survey-based research employed three sets of instruments for measurement: Humor Styles Questionnaire(HSQ), Revised Life Orientation Test (LOT-R) and Sympton Checklist 90(SCL-90). 300 university students (119males & 181females) from City University of Hong Kong and 500 university students (134males & 366 females) from Inner Mongolia Normal University participated in the research, The results showed:1. The general condition of undergraduates, mental health is not good. Compared with the national average group, the mainland students, mental health is worse while Hong kong students get worse mental health than mainland students.2. Both Hong kong students and mainland students use more affiliative humor and less self-defeating humor. Mainland students use more self-enhancing humor while Hong kong students use more satire humor. 3. There is no significant difference on dispositional optimism between Hong kong students and mainland students. Students were selected and divided into the high optimist and low optimist and high optimist use less satire and self-defeating humor. High mainland optimist use more affiliative and self-enchancing humor than low mainland optimist.4. Affiliative , self-enchancing humor and dispositional optimism positively correlated with mental health, while satire and self-defeating humor negatively correlated with mental health. Dispositional optimism positively correlated with affiliative and self-enchancing humor, but negatively correlated with satire and self-defeating humor.5. Compared with less healthier students, the healthier students are not only more optimistic but also use more affiliative, self-enchancing humor and less satire and self-defeating humor.6. Dispositional optimism interacts with humor styles and they can both predict the mental health status of college students.