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

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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.

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Availability of data and material

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the Open Science Framework repository at https://osf.io/nqp5h/?view_only=e61af24eecb94a00890d30d93a68aae0

The questionnaire (Humor Styles Questionnaire) in Serbian translation is available at https://osf.io/3ps6y/.

Notes

  1. One of items that had a low correlation with the rest of the scale was removed, specifically, “I prefer to be direct and forthright when discussing with people.”.

  2. Greenhouse–Geisser correction has been applied since the assumption of sphericity was not met.

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Funding

The authors did not receive any funding for conducting the study in Serbia. The work of Radosław Rogoza was supported by the Foundation for Polish Science (FNP).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia

    Marija Branković

  2. Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, Belgrade, Serbia

    Marija Branković

  3. Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University, Warsaw, Poland

    Radosław Rogoza

  4. University of Lleida, Lleida, Spain

    Radosław Rogoza

  5. Management and Organizational Studies, Faculty of Social Science, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, N6A 5C2, Canada

    Julie Aitken Schermer

Authors
  1. Marija Branković
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  2. Radosław Rogoza
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  3. Julie Aitken Schermer
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Marija Branković and Radoslaw Rogoza. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Marija Branković and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Marija Branković.

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The study was performed in accordance with the ethical standards as laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and the Ethical Code of the Serbian Psychological Association. Explicit approval was not required since the institutional ethics committee was not established at the moment of data collection.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants prior to their participation. Participation was anonymous, and no sensitive data were collected.

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Branković, M., Rogoza, R. & Schermer, J.A. Humor styles in Serbia: an evaluation of the Humor Styles Questionnaire and correlations with social attitudes. Curr Psychol 42, 21733–21745 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03278-6

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