Using Self-Directed Humor to Regulate Emotion: Effects Comparison of Self-Enhancing Humor and Self-Defeating Humor

Abstract

Humor is an effective strategy in regulating emotion. Whereas most previous studies have investigated the correlational relationship between self-directed humor and mental health, it is largely unknown whether self-directed humor causally regulates emotions. The purpose of this study is to examine the causal effect of two types of self-directed humor (self-enhancing vs. self-defeating) on emotion regulation. Initially, participants (N = 75, M_age = 20.31 ± 1.19 years, 62.67% female) were asked to immerse themselves in negative scenes by reading paragraphs. They then rated their feelings of positive and negative emotions before and after reading sentences of different conditions (including baseline, cognitive reappraisal, self-enhancing humor, and self-defeating humor) that randomly matched the scenes. Humor feelings for strategies were rated in the last stage. Results of ANOVA indicated that compared to the baseline, participants experienced an increase in positive emotion and a decrease in negative emotion in the other three conditions. Self-enhancing humor was the most effective in regulating emotion, whereas no significant difference was observed between self-defeating humor and cognitive reappraisal. Furthermore, participants reported that the feeling of humor from self-enhancing humor was higher than from self-defeating humor, as well as from cognitive reappraisal than in the baseline. Mediation analysis suggested that the difference in humor feelings might be due to the changes in positive and negative emotions caused by different conditions. In short, the findings demonstrate that different styles of self-directed humor can causally regulate emotions, and this paper provides new evidence for using self-directed humor to improve emotional well-being.