Humor styles in Serbia: an evaluation of the Humor Styles Questionnaire and correlations with social attitudes

Abstract

Humor styles refer to the everyday use of humor, varying across self-enhancing, affiliative, aggressive and self-defeating styles, entailing differences in focus on the self vs. other as well as between being adaptive vs. maladaptive. We validated the instrument devised to capture these differences, the Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ; Martin et al., Journal of Research in Personality 37:48–75, 2003), in a novel cultural context. Furthermore, we investigated the relations of humor styles with various aspects of social orientations and attitudes, to widen the understanding of the correlates. Our study showed that the suggested four-factor structure reproduces reasonably well in the Serbian context, with some notable exceptions. Humor styles were meaningfully related to basic social connectedness of the individual (loneliness and self-esteem) as well as the wider social orientations and attitudes (their value orientations, social dominance orientation, and ethnocentrism). The self-defeating humor style was reflective of a more negative view of oneself and subordination to the group while the aggressive humor style indicated endorsement of dominance within the in-group over other groups. We discuss the cross-cultural validity of the instrument and how the findings contribute to a wider positioning of the humor styles within the domain of social-psychological variables.