Mindfulness and self-compassion as predictors of humor styles in US and Russia

Abstract

Mindfulness and self-compassion are increasingly coming into mainstream psychological research in the Western world as they correlate with and predict various aspects of mental health and positivity. However, little is known about their relationship to another construct that is also associated with well-being, that is, humor. The unique contribution of the present study is in exploring whether mindfulness and self-compassion would predict the use of adaptive and maladaptive humor styles and whether this prediction will be the same across cultures. 90 U.S. and 106 Russian college students responded to a survey consisting of three measures: Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS; Brown & Ryan, 2003), Self-Compassion Scale-Short Form (SCS-SF; Raes, Pommier, Neff, & Van Gucht, 2011), and Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ; Martin, Puhlik-Doris, Larsen, Gray, & Weir, 2003). Our findings suggest that mindfulness and self-compassion can serve as predictors of humor styles, that is, more mindful and self-compassionate participants tended to use more adaptive humor styles and less maladaptive styles. However, the contribution of these two variables to the variance in humor styles depended on the culture.