Character Strengths— Scientific Benefits of Developing Humor
Developing humor is really just another form of COMMUNICATION. It’s part of our communication skills set. Children need to be allowed and encouraged to be funny, in his or her own way. Laughter can unite groups. Laughter not only creates a shared experience in the moment, but it also creates a memory to recollect and laugh at over and over.
I never expected humor to be something that can be considered as one of the VIA character strengths. When I learned of the different psychological strengths, I guess I was sure that humor is truly not one of my strengths.
I remember the years when I ran out of humor. I can say that it was hard, it was truly gloomy and now I know why. In this article let’s learn about one of the positive psychology strengths
Humor as one of the VIA Character Strengths
Article Review— Getting Serious About Funny: Psychologists See Humor As A Character strength
‘Funny’ Exercises
What it was like to live for years without humor
Humor as one of the VIA Character Strengths
Before the proliferation of positive psychology, ‘traditional’ psychology focused on diagnoses of illnesses with the help of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual. So when Positive psychology came, Peterson and Seligman created an assessment inventory, the VIA Character Strengths inventory to provide a way to categorize and define individual psychological strengths rather than define them with their illnesses.
The VIA Character Strengths Inventory provides six virtues that further subcategorize the 24 strengths. Humor is under the virtue category of Transcendence. Transcendence describes strengths that help you connect to the larger universe and provide meaning. The other strengths under this virtue are an appreciation of beauty & excellence, gratitude, hope, humor, and spirituality.
According to VIACharacter.Org:
“Humor means to recognize what is amusing in situations and to offer the lighter side to others. Humor is an important lubricant to social interactions and can contribute to team building or moving toward group goals. Where other strengths are more or less essential for achieving certain types of goals or dealing with certain types of problems, humor is rarely an essential component to positive social interactions, but it is often a desirable one. It is also a valuable method of coping with distressing situations.”
Humor is more than just the concept of being funny. Humor is having the capacity to bring joy through smiles, and laughter to others. It also is about having the ability to be collected and a cheerful view during a hard time, thus allowing an individual to see a brighter side and sustain a good mood in times of dimness.
Having a good understanding of humor can help you begin recognizing it in yourself and others.
Article Review— Getting serious about funny: Psychologists see humor as a character strength
Humor was a not-so-popular concept with psychologists before the era of positive psychology. It was regarded as defense mechanism or an Id conflict (Freudian) expressing dominance and rudeness.
When it became one of positive psychology strengths, it soon had a following that resulted in an abundance of humor researches.
Janet Gibson, a professor of Cognitive Psychology at Grinnell University wrote:
“…research on humor has come into the sunlight of late, with humor now viewed as a character strength. Positive psychology, a field that examines what people do well, notes that humor can be used to make others feel good, to gain intimacy, or to help buffer stress. Along with gratitude, hope, and spirituality, a sense of humor belongs to the set of strengths positive psychologists call transcendence; together they help us forge connections to the world and provide meaning to life. Appreciation of humor correlates with other strengths, too, such as wisdom and love of learning. And humor activities or exercises result in increased feelings of emotional well-being and optimism.”
She wrote an extensive and interesting article at theconversation.com and discussed the following:
- How we relate to a joke
- Reasons why we don’t get a joke
- How humor is an indication of we see our past, present, and future.
It is a bit technical and science-y when you read it, but in this article, I believe I could help you digest these things in no time.
1. How We Relate To a Joke
There are three mental stages before we get to understand and create something humorous, the following is how cognitive psychologists define it:
- Mentally represent the set up of the joke.
- Detect an incongruity in its multiple interpretations.
- Resolve the incongruity by inhibiting the literal, non-funny interpretations and appreciating the meaning of the funny one.
But that is the hard way of putting it. We can understand the above and put things simply by looking at the three stages by analyzing the bear strip from the Far Side Comics below.
Mental representation (a) is simply “having a certain idea about something”. We look at the picture and we see three bears with two bears looking at the lone bear. We have our certain idea about bears walking upright and the picture seems alright.
Now we notice the caption. It implies that the three bears are doing very human-like actions, for example: being impolite, walking upright with a big bulging belly like humans with beer belly(b). It then includes a very playful description of its belly as a belly full of deer meat (deer gut).
We now then stop thinking of the idea that the illustration is a normal “forest situation with three bears” (c) but instead we think “wait, bears don’t usually walk like that, plus a bear with a beer-belly? Oh no wait, it’s a deer-belly!”
We find a joke as funny whenever we meld two incompatible ideas and let it overcome despite it being illogical. Cognitive psychologists say that finding things funny is a subjective experience and from the resolution of at least two strange ideas. In verbal jokes, the second idea is often activated at the end, in a punchline.
2. Reasons Why We Don’t Get A Joke
Gibson cited two reasons why we don’t get a joke, she said “There are at least two reasons that we sometimes don’t get the joke. First, the punchline must create a different mental representation that conflicts with the one set up by the joke; timing and laugh tracks help signal the listener that a different representation of the punchline is possible. Second, you must be able to inhibit the initial mental representation.”
To put it simply, if there is a part of the joke that is offensive, you might not find the joke funny.
An example is when there are racist, sexist remarks and violence. This is one of the reasons why older adults cannot “get jokes” easily. Another reason why adults cannot get jokes is, there is a decline of cognitive resources as one gets older thus they cannot see an idea as another thing.
This gives us the perspective that getting the joke is dependent on working memory capacity and control functions. Adults who make an effort to continually exercise these functions are found to show greater appreciation of jokes than younger adults and they report higher life satisfaction than those who found it hard to find humor.
Advancing age can set the stage for an appreciation of humor. Humor is linked with wisdom, and wisdom increases with age and is associated with subjective well-being.
With aging comes intuition, a form of decision-making guided by experience and expertise; intuition is what aids humor in mental representations, thus using speedy first impression than being accordingly logical.
3.How Humor Is An Indication Of Our Mental Representations Of The Past, Present, And Future.
Your perspective about your past can manifest in how you use this character strength humor. There are two kinds of past perspectives, the negative and the positive. A negative past perspective is indicated by frequent thinking about bygone mistakes that don’t have anything to do with the present environment, even reliving them in vivid detail despite the present or future being positive. One study found those using self-defeating humor held negative past time perspectives and individuals who use humor in positive ways held positive past time perspectives.
So can you know if you are using humor positively and negatively? Well, you simply need to find about the following types of humor styles. These styles aren’t just about telling jokes these can be related to our everyday approach to using humor in our exchanges with other people.
They are:
- Self-enhancing humor – This is the kind of humor that makes us feel good. A manifestation is when you can cheer and lift yourself or poke fun at yourself (in a good way). If this is you then you are most likely to find humor in everyday life.
- Affiliative humor— This is the kind of humor that can help in building relationships with others. If you can exchange teasing with others in a good, clean fun manner. Then most likely you’re a witty one!
- Aggressive humor—This is the kind of humor that can make us feel good but at the expense of others. This is a kind of joke that is more likely can be called hurtful teasing, insult, or mockery.
- Self-defeating humor—This kind of humor helps us build relationships with others, but then this is at the expense of ourselves. Most likely you make yourself the subject of your jokes and teasing.
There is a concept in psychology called the time perspective. This concept holds that our perception of our past, present, and future influences our emotions, perceptions, and actions. This time perspective is also associated with feelings of well-being.
People report a greater sense of well-being depends on the quality of the details of their past or present recollections. When study participants focused on “how” details, which tend to elicit vivid details, they were more satisfied with life than when they focused on “why,” which tends to elicit abstract ideas. For example, when remembering a failed relationship, those focusing on events that led to the breakup were more satisfied than those dwelling on abstract causal explanations concerning love and intimacy.
‘Funny Exercises’
Did you know that you can use your strength of humor to creating more happiness in the long run? If so, then laughter is truly the best medicine! Whenever you smile and laugh you get to connect more with others and therefore experience more pleasure in life. Just like the other psychological strengths, humor can be developed and enhanced!
New research from humor scientist, Willibald Ruch, and his team, finds that humor interventions affect our well-being and have some impact on depression too. They conducted a randomized, placebo-controlled study to investigate the role of humor. The five humor exercises they tested over a period of 1 week were:
1.) Three funny things: At the end of each day, write down the 3 funniest things you experienced that day. Describe the feelings during each experience.
2.) Count funny things: As each day progresses, keep track of all the funny things that happen. Briefly jot down each one so that you can get a total at the end of each day.
3.) Applying humor: Notice humorous things that happen during a typical day and add new humorous activities. You might include watching a comedy movie or sitcom, talking with your funniest friend on the phone, looking up funny things on the Internet, or reading comics or jokes.
4.) Collecting funny things: Recall one of the funniest things you experienced in the past (recent past or distant past) and write the memory down in as much detail as you can.
5.) Resolving stress with humor: Think about a stressful experience from your day. Write about how it was – or could have been – resolved funnily and humorously.
Each of the activities boosted happiness and lowered depression in the short-run, but the first three activities were especially effective, boosting happiness for six months!
If you ever have taken the VIA Character Strength Survey and found that humor is one of you psychological strengths, then I guess you’re one of the lucky ones!
The best way to use developing humor is to let it flow naturally from your character, rather than working to create a specific image
