Benevolent and Corrective Humor, Life Satisfaction, and Broad Humor Dimensions: Extending the Nomological Network of the
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Benevolent and Corrective Humor, Life Satisfaction, and Broad Humor Dimensions: Extending the Nomological Network of the BenCor Across 25 Countries Sonja Heintz, et al. [full author details at the end of the article]
© Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract Benevolent and corrective humor are two comic styles that have been related to virtue, morality, and character strengths. A previous study also supported the viability of measuring these two styles with the BenCor in 22 countries. The present study extends the previous one by including further countries (a total of 25 countries in 29 samples with N = 7813), by testing the revised BenCor (BenCor-R), and by adding two criterion measures to assess life satisfaction and four broad humor dimensions (social fun/entertaining humor, mockery, humor ineptness, and cognitive/reflective humor). As expected, the BenCor-R showed mostly promising psychometric properties (internal consistency and factorial validity). Consistent with previous studies, benevolent humor correlated positively with life satisfaction in most countries, while corrective humor was uncorrelated with life satisfaction. These relationships were only slightly changed when controlling for social fun/entertaining humor and mockery, respectively. Benevolent humor was mostly positively associated with cognitive/reflective humor, followed by social fun/entertaining humor and mockery. Corrective humor was mostly positively associated with mockery, followed by cognitive/ reflective and social fun/entertaining humor, although these relationships differed between the countries. Overall, the present study supports the viability of benevolent and corrective humor, which has yet received insufficient attention in psychology, for cross-cultural investigations and applications of humor, well-being, and morality. Keywords Humor · Life satisfaction · Cross-cultural comparisons · BenCor
1 Introduction In psychology, humor has been recognized as a possible source of well-being for almost 100 years, starting with Sigmund Freud’s essay on humor as a mature defense mechanism (1928). Humor has been broadly defined as encompassing all phenomena related to the
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1090 2-019-00185-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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funny or the comic (Martin and Ford 2018; Ruch et al. 2018a). Research has shown that some humor and comic styles1 might be more beneficial than others, but some styles might be potentially harmful (Martin and Ford 2018; Martin et al. 2003; Ruch et al. 2018b). While the relationship between humor and its different styles with well-being has been intensively studied, little is known about the cross-cultural consistency of these relationships. The present study thus combines humor with positive-psychology and cross-cultural perspectives to determine how two comic styles, benevolent and corrective, relate to life satisfaction in 25 countries.
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