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Abstract. Humor training has become increasingly popular to enhance the “sense of humor” and well-being and to decrease depressive symptoms. Despite the wide applications of these training programs, the assessment of training efficacy has attracted less attention. The Sense of Humor Scale (SHS; McGhee, 1996 , 1999 ) recently was expanded to a long version (SHS-L) to enhance its internal consistency ( Ruch & Heintz, 2018 ). At the same time, there is also the need for a brief version of this scale. The purpose of the present study is to develop a short version (SHS-S) in both German- and English-speaking countries, test its psychometric properties (internal consistency, factorial, construct, and criterion validity), and assess measurement invariance across gender and the two languages. Using three samples (Sample 1: 570 English-speakers, Sample 2: 353 German-speakers, Sample 3: 94 other-reports), the 29-item SHS-S was developed and yielded promising internal consistency and validity scores for the six humor skill factors of enjoyment of humor, laughter, verbal humor, finding humor in everyday life, laughing at yourself, and humor under stress. Overall, the SHS-S is an internally consistent, valid, and economic tool for future research and group-based applications, while the SHS-L seems especially useful in individual applications.

This article includes comments on each contributing author’s article in this special issue of Humor. The articles represent an assessment of McGhee’s research, work on practical applications or influence in the following areas: 1) the development of children’s humor, 2) construction and validation of the Sense of Humor Scale (SHS), 3) usefulness of specific subscales of the SHS, including “playfulness” and “laughing at yourself,” 4) development and evaluation of the 7 Humor Habits Program—a training program for learning to use humor to cope with stress, 5) humor’s impact on physical health and emotional well being, 6) impact on the field of nursing, and 7) humor and the brain. McGhee provides here his response to each contributed article.

This article examines available (mainly anecdotal) evidence related to the experience of humor among chimpanzees and gorillas in the wild, in captivity and following systematic sign language training. Humor is defined as one form of symbolic play. Positive evidence of object permanence, cross-modal perception, deferred imitation and deception among chimpanzees and gorillas is used to document their cognitive capacity for humor. Playful teasing is proposed as the primordial form of humor among apes in the wild. This same form of humor is commonly found among signing apes, both in overt behavior and in signed communications. A second form of humor emerges in the context of captivity, consisting of throwing feces at human onlookers—who often respond to this with laughter. This early form of humor shows up in signing apes in the form of calling others “dirty,” a sign associated with feces. The diversity of forms of signing humor shown by apes is linked to McGhee, Paul E.Humor: Its origin and development. San Francisco, CA: W. H. Freeman & Co, McGhee, Paul E.Understanding and promoting the development of children’s humor. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt. model of humor development.

This chapter builds the case for incorporating more humor into early childhood education (ECE). The importance of play for young children’s learning has long been recognized, but the relevance of humor (a unique form of mental play that is every child’s biological heritage) in children’s education has been neglected for just as long. ECE teachers have generally failed to take advantage of the built-in pleasure children experience in distorting their understanding of the world as a tool for supporting the education process. The positive emotion generally associated with play is emphasized here as a crucial ingredient in optimizing young children’s learning. Humor adds one more source of positive emotion to classroom learning. The varying ways in which humor supports young children’s learning and development are discussed.

This chapter shows that humor can best be viewed as a subset of the broader category of play. It suggests that the child's information-processing frame of mind plays the key role in determining whether humor or some other form of enjoyment is experienced when incongruous relationships are entertained in fantasy play. The new play activity reflects the child's new symbolic capacity that initially consists of mere manipulation of images of objects in the absence of those objects and constitutes the beginning of imaginative or make-believe play. Imaginative play offers an ideal means of doing the child has complete control over the nature of the stimulation produced. Regardless of the position taken on the issue of whether all humor relies at some level on incongruity, theorists and investigators studying humor appear to agree that incongruous events can be humorous.

These studies examined the effect of degree of similarity between Ss and cartoon characters depicted as victims of an accidental mishap, on appreciation of humor occurring in connection with the mishap. In Study 1, low-income white, black, and Mexican-American boys and girls between 3 and 6 years of age were presented with pairs of drawings differing only in the identification of the victim of the mishap and were asked to choose the funnier of the two. Study 2 followed the same procedure with a middle-income group of 4- to 6-year-old white boys and girls. The pairs of humorous drawings included the following comparisons of victims: boy vs girl, son vs father, son vs mother, daughter vs father, and daughter vs mother. Findings for middle-income children and low-income boys from all three racial-ethnic backgrounds were consistently in the direction predicted by the disposition theory of humor: humor victimizing a parent was funnier than humor victimizing a child, and humor victimizing the opposite sex was funnier than humor victimizing one's own sex. For low-income girls, however, humor victimizing one's own sex was funnier than humor victimizing the opposite sex. Sex-difference data are interpreted in terms of the importance of extent of traditional sex-role development.

Humor has been conceptualized as a character strength that contributes to fulfillment in life. Various conceptualizations of humor (e.g., sense of humor, humor styles, coping humor, trait cheerfulness) have been related to a wide range of measures of subjective well-being (e.g., higher life satisfaction, positive affect, and lower levels of depression, anxiety, and negative emotion). This chapter introduces the concept of humor and its measurement and reviews the research aimed at training humor. Special attention is given to the 7 Humor Habits Program, which is described, along with the contents of the eight group meetings, and a variety of homework activities and humor log exercises aimed at strengthening the humor habits. The training has proved to be effective in boosting humor and elevating life satisfaction. Directions for future research and application are suggested.

Thepresent article advances a model of humor development extending from late adolescence until about age 60. Previously advanced models of humor development during the preadolescent years are reviewed, and issues related to the proposal of models of adult humor development are discussed. The developmental model presented here drawsfrom a series of factor-analytic studies which document the importance of two principal humor-appreciation factors (nonsense and incongruity plus resolution), andfrom a broad range of data demonstrating age-related changes in personality measures closely associated with these two factors. Separate attention is given by the model to positive (funniness) and negative (aversiveness) aspects ofreactions to cartoons andjokes.

Summary This study was designed to identify behavioral characteristics conducive to increased development of preschool children's sense of humor. The Ss were 60 38- to 75-month-old children from a university child development center. The frequency of laughter and both behavioral and verbal attempts to initiate humor were observed during spontaneous free play sessions. Additional behavior categories were chosen for observation on the basis of previous evidence regarding behavioral antecedents of humor development. A stepwise multiple regression of the latter behaviors upon sense of humor scores indicated that the amount of time spent in social play accounted for the greatest amount of variance in the amount of laughter and humor initiation shown. This finding supports other evidence documenting the importance of social factors for humor. Limited support was obtained for the view that humor provides a means of rechanneling aggressive behavior tendencies into more socially acceptable forms of behavior.

Summary Humor's ability to contribute to children's social development is examined in this chapter. It is suggested that humor be viewed as a component of social competence. General social functions of humor are discussed, including the facilitation of social interaction, development of friendships and popularity, provision of a socially acceptable means of expressing hostility, and softening of an assertive/dominating style of interaction with others. Humor's usefulness in helping the humor initiator search for or communicate information (such as like or dislike for another) or to save face is also discussed. It is concluded that the development of heightened early humor helps to optimize children's social development.

Social and personality correlates of humour were studied with a college age sample (n = 446) and a small sample of elderly women (n = 27). In the college sample, self-monitoring of expressive behaviour and social assertiveness were more important predictors of humour than were general social self-esteem, machiavellianism, masculinity or femininity for both male and female respondents. These results were partially replicated in the elderly sample.

Summary Two separate studies, using a low-income black (N = 30) and a middle-income white (N = 30) sample, examined the amount of pretend play shown by 21/2- to 5-year-old boys as a function of the realistic structure level of toys. Children were presented one structure level at a time and were allowed to play with the toys for as long as they wished. Comparable findings were obtained for the two samples. More frequent pretend behavior was shown with unstructured toys, but children played longer with high structure toys. Unstructured toys were associated with high playing time only when they were presented before high or moderate structure toys.

Heart rate and skin conductance were monitored continuously while subjects heard and responded to seven riddles and seven problems which were structurally similar. Hypotheses based on cognitive problem-solving models of humor were tested by comparing changes occurring during problem solving with those that occurred during "riddle solving". While heart rate tended to accelerate once a riddle or problem was presented and decelerate once the answer or punch line was given, there were significant differences in skin conductance between riddle- and problem-solving responses, suggesting that a purely problem-solving model of humor may be untenable. A test of Berlyne's hypothesis of arousal change and humor appreciation was also made. As predicted, humor appreciation was greatest for those who showed a moderate amount of change.

This study examined the early development of humor depicting victims of other racial-ethnic groups among low-income black, Mexican American, and white children and middle-income white children. Boys and girls between 3 and 6 years of age were presented with pairs of drawings differing only in the identification of the victim of a minor mishap and were asked to choose the funnier of the two. The pairs included the following comparisons: black versus white victim, black versus Mexican American victim, and white versus Mexican American victim. As hypothesized, only white children found it funnier to see a child of another racial-ethnic group victimized in humor than a child of their own group. This occurred for both low- and middle-income children. The lack of significant humor preferences among black and Mexican American children are explained in terms of their greater ambivalence regarding early positive identification with their own racial-ethnic group.

Mothers of high and low fear of failure (FF) Ss completed a modified Winterbottom questionnaire. The results indicated that: (1) mothers of high FF Ss expected independence and achievement behaviors earlier than mothers of low FF Ss; (2) mothers of high FF Ss were neutral following satisfactory behavior and mothers of low FF Ss rewarding; (3) Ss whose mothers were neutral following satisfactory behavior and punishing following unsatisfactory behavior had higher FF motivation than Ss whose mothers were rewarding and neutral respectively. It was concluded that only (2) and (3) contribute to the differential development of FF and HS (hope of success) achievement motivation. (Author)

Cette etude traite des problemes methodologiques poses par les recherches inter-culturelles sur l'humour. L'A. presente un modele de developpement du sens de l'humour chez l'enfant et propose des hypotheses verifiables concernant les similitudes et differences existant dans l'humour enfantin. Il cherche a isoler les mecamsmes cognitifs qui jouent un role important dans le processus de la reaction d'humour et, parallelement, examine les caracteristiques specifiques des stimuli declenchant cette reaction. L'assimilation imaginaire d'information par l'enfant est supposee agir de facon primordiale dans l'humour qui, dans toutes les cultures, est base sur l'existence de contrastes dans le stimulus. Une attention particuliere est consacree aux elements de base permettant de prevoir les similitudes et differences de l'attitude des enfants a l'egard de l'humour dans diverses cultures.

The interdisciplinary focus of these two volumes underscores the fact that humor can be explained or discussed from many different vantage points. This diversity is essential to the ultimate achievement of a comprehensive understanding of humor. Most attempts to explain humor have focused on cognitive, social, emotional, linguistic, psychodynamic, sociological, or anthropological variables, as these two volumes attest. Relatively little attention has been given to more reductive explanations of humor. The present chapter will focus on theoretical issues and data related to psychophysiological explanations of humor.

The present chapter explores the relationship between female development and different aspects of humor responsiveness, such as laughing or smiling, joking, and clowning. Considerable progress has been made in the past decade toward a general understanding of humor (see Chapman and Foot, 1976, 1977; Goldstein and McGhee, 1972; and McGhee and Chapman, 1980), but it is only recently that we have begun to recognize the differential significance of humor for the development of males and females. It is proposed here that a clearly definable set of sex-role standards regarding humor exists for males and females in our culture. Most important along these lines is the expectation that males should be initiators of humor, while females should be responders. It is proposed that the use of humor in interpersonal interaction serves as a means of gaining or maintaining dominance or control over the social situation. Because of the power associated with the successful use of humor, humor initiation has become associated with other traditionally masculine characteristics, such as aggressiveness, dominance, and assertiveness. For a female to develop into a clown or joker, then, she must violate the behavioral pattern normally reserved for women. Data reviewed below suggest that females who have developed a highly initiating sense of humor do show many common behavioral characteristics with males, although they have also developed a pattern of humor responsiveness that is peculiarly associated with females.

In its most general form, the discrepancy hypothesis states that an organism attends and affectively responds to new stimuli as an inverted-U function of the stimuli’s physical or conceptual discrepancy (i.e., dissimilarity) from a well-familiarized standard stimulus. That is, moderate discrepancies from highly familiar stimuli receive both the highest degree of attention and positive affect, whereas stimuli that are quite familiar or extremely different from what the organism knows well receive relatively less attention and less positive—perhaps even negative—affective responses and evaluations. The hypothesis is presented graphically in Figure 1.

The study of humor development progressively increased through the decade of the 1970s. Evidence of the resurgence of interest in this long-neglected area of development may be found not only in the increasing number of journal articles devoted to it, but also in the recent reissueing of Wolfenstein’s (1954) psychoanalytically oriented Children’s Humor in 1978 and the publication of Children’s Riddling (McDowell, 1979), Humor: Its Origin and Development (McGhee, 1979), and Children’s Humour. (McGhee & Chapman, 1980). Most of this research has focused on the elementary school years, with studies of preschoolers being second most frequent. Surprisingly, very few studies have dealt with humor among adolescents, and those have rarely been developmental in nature. While college students remain the most frequently studied age group in this as well as other areas of research, these studies have also rarely been conceptualized to examine developmental change. While a number of studies have used subjects at various points in the postcollege adult years, the author knows of only one that investigated humor development among the elderly (Schaier & Cicirelli, 1976). Thus, while a decade or so of research has sharply increased our understanding of the development of humor up to about junior high school age, we remain completely ignorant of developmental changes from early adolescence through the years of advanced aging. The present chapter is designed to draw attention to this void and to begin to stimulate a life span approach to research on humor development.

This study was designed to determine the relationship between the accuracy of preparenthood expectations about parenthood and the incidence of problems associated with the transition to parenthood. Parents who were expecting their first child in about six weeks completed a prebirth questionnaire pertaining to expectations about various dimensions of parenthood following the birth of their baby. The same questionnaire was administered two months after the birth of the baby, along with questions concerning the kinds of problems the parents had encountered. Two comparison control groups were also tested. Parents' preparenthood expectations did not differ significantly from their subsequent perceptions of parenthood. However, mothers with less accurate expectations about parenthood were most likely to have problems adjusting to parenthood. No comparable relationship was obtained for fathers. Less accurate expectations about parenthood among mothers were also associated with lower levels of preparation for parenting, higher age levels, and a greater number of years of prior marriage. Information is presented regarding the specific aspects of parenthood that mothers and fathers were least prepared for and that posed the greatest problems.

This study was designed to determine the relationship between the amount of time children spend watching television and their knowledge of adult sex-role stereotypes. Males and females in grades 1, 3, 5, and 7 who were classified as heavy television viewers (25 or more hours per week) or light viewers (10 or less hours per week) both at the time of the study and 15 months previously were administered the Sex Stereotype Measure, an instrument designed to determine children's awareness of stereotyped sex-role perceptions held by adults. Heavy viewers were found to have more stereotyped perceptions than light viewers. A significant interaction effect indicated that among low viewers the perception of male stereotypes steadily declines with increasing age; among heavy viewers, stereotypic responses to male items are maintained with increasing age. No comparable interaction effect was obtained for perception of female stereotypes. The role of interaction with live models in breaking down stereotypic perceptions of males is discussed.

Summary The importance of mastery in children's humor has been emphasized by many researchers and theorists. The present study tested the hypothesis that a high level of mastery over S's sex-role identity enhances the funniness of humor based on sex inappropriate behavior. Seventeen three- to five-year-old boys were tested on the It Scale and were shown drawings of children engaged in sex appropriate or inappropriate behavior whose outcome was either positive or negative. While inappropriate and negative outcomes were consistently seen as funnier than appropriate and positive ones, when inappropriate positive outcomes were pitted against appropriate negative ones, boys choosing the former as funnier than the latter had significantly higher sexrole identity scores. Support was claimed for the general role of mastery in children's humor.

College Ss were shown cartoons either alone with E or with 4 other Ss. While firstborns showed greater appreciation of humor in the group, later borns found the cartoons funnier in the individual condition. Overt signs of appreciation of humor are interpreted as resulting from firstborn Ss affiliative concerns and the lack of such concerns among later born Ss.

MCGHEE, PAUL E. Children's Appreciation of Humor: A Test of the Cognitive Congruency Principle. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1976, 47, 420-426. Earlier studies of attention in infancy and of problem solving in young children provided support for a "discrepancy hypothesis," which proposes an invertedU relationship between amount of discrepancy between existing cognitive structured and current stimulus input and amount of pleasure derived from the successful processing of that input. The present studies were designed in an effort to demonstrate a comparable relationship with respect to children's appreciation of humor. Children varying in the degree of (or length of time since) acquisition of conservation and class inclusion concepts were presented jokes in which the humor depicted derived from the violation of these 2 concepts. The results indicated that humor appreciation was greatest soon after the concepts were acquired, with reduced appreciation shown both by subjects who did not possess the concepts and by subjects who had mastered them several years previously. Support was claimed for the view than an optimal moderate amount of cognitive challenge is associated with maximal appreciation of humor.