Sense of humor at work: assessment and associations with health

Abstract

This dissertation is about health-related sense of humor measurement and associations between a sense of humor and health. Two sense of humor measures were developed, the QOHC and the HCL. The QOHC measures four humorous coping styles, aimed at acquiring positive affective states: antecedent-focused (AFHC), response-focused (RFHC), affiliative and aggressive-manipulative. AFHC is defined as the preventive use of humor to decrease negative affect, whereas RFHC is aimed at the reduction of negative affect already present. AFHC is expected to be more favorable to health than RFHC. Although the QOHC showed good validity and adequate divergent validity, the differences between positive and negative forms of humorous coping was not clear-cut. In an additional study, the QOHC and six other currently available humorous coping questionnaires were compared with regard to their fit with a stress-coping model. A mapping sentence was formed, which included external demands, humorous coping responses and coping aims. Five raters judged 81 humorous coping items from the questionnaires, using this “mapping sentence” as a template. External demands and humorous responses were sometimes underrepresented, whereas the coping aims facet was covered by only a few of them. Raters had difficulty to distinguish between antecedent-focused and response-focused humorous coping aims. Also, the 24-item HCL was developed and validated. Its intention is to measure six types of humorous behaviors validly and consistently: humor appreciation, positive humorous coping, mirth, positive humor climate at work, negative humor production and humor reproduction. Internal consistency and validity varied depending on the time window of the HCL used. Two studies were then conducted to test the associations of the new instruments with health. In the first study an occupational health model predicting the frequency of upper respiratory tract infections (URTI) by job demands, job resources (including humorous coping styles) and job-related affect was tested. Most humorous coping styles were unrelated to URTI frequency, except for response-focused humorous coping, which was positively related to it. Response-focused humorous coping was also positively related to negative job-related affect, which was positively associated with URTI frequency. The model including antecedent-focused humorous coping showed that this style was positively associated with positive job-related affect and negatively related to negative job-related affect. However, job control and negative job-related affect were more powerful predictors of URTI frequency than humorous coping styles. In the second study burnout was considered to influence humorous behaviors in a negative way, compared to healthy subjects. Also, burnout subjects were supposed to differ with regard to their humor styles. Burnout and healthy subjects were compared with regard to humorous traits (generic humorous coping and humor styles) and humorous behaviors during the past two weeks. The burnout group had lower generic humorous coping and lower positive humor styles than the control group, whereas no differences with respect to negative humor styles were found. The burnout group reported lower mirth, humor appreciation and humor reproduction than the control group, but the groups showed no differences with regard to more active humor use like negative humor production and positive humorous coping.