or lack thereof have profound effects on health (Berkman & Syme, 1979; House, Robbins, & Metzner, 1982; Kiecolt-Glaser & Newton, 2001; Ross, Mirowsky, &
Goldsteen, 1990). While no single mechanism has been implicated, evidence sug- gests that close others, including family members, infl uence health behavior (e.g., Cohen & Lichtenstein, 1990; DiMatteo, 2004; Franks, Pienta, & Wray, 2002; Gal- lant, 2003; Umberson, 1987).
Recent research highlights the importance of relational health goals. In one study (Orom, 2006) college-aged smokers who varied in their motivation to quit smoking were asked the extent to which they were motivated to quit smoking for the sake of an important close other and the extent to which they believed this person wanted them to quit. Motivation to quit smoking was correlated, modestly but highly signifi cantly, with both wanting to quit for this person and perceiving this other person as wanting one to quit (Orom, 2006). These correlations may underestimate the potential strength of concordance between wanting to quit and wanting to quit for a close other, given that in this study the close other was also required to be another smoker. An interesting prospect is that relational motives might vary in importance across different points in the quit process. When cor- relations were computed separately for smokers who were highly motivated to quit smoking (to the least they intended to quit within 30 days) and those who were less motivated (intended to quit within six months or longer), we found that these correlations were even stronger for those who were less motivated, but nonsignifi - cant for those who were already more motivated to quit, suggesting that relational motives might be associated with starting to contemplate quitting but might not have a large impact on motivating actual behavior change.
PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT AND
standard of personality. One’s focus shifts, instead, to the challenge of assessing (a) patterns of overt personality functioning, including meaningful variations in behavior from one context to another, and (b) contextualized personality struc- tures that contribute to these overt patterns. One domain in which this challenge recently has been taken up, and that illustrates the general strategy of assessment embraced by the KAPA model of personality architecture (Cervone, 2004), is the assessment of humor.
Assessing Humor: Global Inter-Individual and Contextualized Intra-Individual Strategies
The study of humor and personality again reveals the contrast between personality psychology in the past and more recent trends. A century ago, the study of per- sonality and humor was grounded in theories of underlying personality structure and dynamics (Freud, 1905/1960). The theoretical formulation of Freud examined the mental life of the individual, and it was expected that the individual’s experi- ences and actions might vary dynamically across time and context. In the recent era, researchers instead have focused their attention on the assessment of surface- level tendencies in humorous behavior, rather than underlying personality struc- ture, and have centered their assessments on average displays of humor-related behavior.
This shift in focus, from the study of dynamic personality structures and processes to the description of overt tendencies, is quite explicit. In construct- ing a humor response questionnaire (reviewed immediately below), Martin and Lefcourt (1984) explain that a behavioral indicator of humor production, the ten- dency to smile and laugh in a variety of situations, was chosen “to avoid the debate over the processes involved in humor.” The processes that Martin and Lefcourt avoid are exactly those processes to which one’s attention is drawn if one adopts an intra-individual approach to personality assessment. The cost of ignoring these processes, and the associated within-person variability, may not be merely a loss of information. The cost may include a loss of validity of the nomothetic assess- ments themselves, for two reasons. First, people joke about things – typically about things that are happening in some but not other situations; in other words, there is intra-individual variability in the use of humor and in its underlying reasons, such that it is not clear exactly what one is assessing by ignoring this source of variation.
Second, without some theoretical understanding of what causes individuals to use humor in one versus another situation, there are no criteria by which to validate its measurement (cf. Borsboom, Mellenbergh, & van Heerden, 2004). Such is the case with nomothetic measures of humor, whereby behaviors are treated as transparent indicators of goals. Two prominent humor measures, the SHRQ and the HSQ are discussed below in reference to these issues.
The SHRQ (Martin & Lefcourt, 1984). The SHRQ is a 21-item measure of the tendency to smile and laugh in a variety of situations. For 18 of the items, par- ticipants are confronted with a scenario and asked how they would respond to it or
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how they have responded in the past. For instance, the item, “If a friend gave you a puzzle to solve and you found, much to your friend’s surprise, that you were able to solve it very quickly,” is followed by fi ve Guttman-style options, ranging from
“I wouldn’t have found it particularly amusing” to “I would have laughed heart- ily.” Three additional items assess the desirability of a sense of humor in choosing friends, the general likelihood of being amused in a variety of situations, and the tendency to vary from one situation to another in behavior.
This measure asks individuals about their humor across a variety of contexts.
To compute an index of an individual’s tendency to respond with mirth, one then aggregates across these contexts. In doing so, the item, “You had accidentally hurt yourself and had to spend a few days in bed,” is treated as interchangeable with
“You were eating in a restaurant with some friends, and the waiter accidentally spilled a drink on you.” Though researchers may treat these situations as function- ally the same, participants may not if they are individuals who interpret social encounters and act according to those interpretations. If, as in the real world, indi- viduals’ use of humor is dependent at least in part on their judgments of the appro- priateness of using humor within these contexts, then it is not clear if the SHRQ is assessing how much humor people have vs. what constellation of events evokes humorous responding. And so this measure of on-average humorous responding is arguably a measure of beliefs about situations. Accordingly, when we add up people’s responses and order them on a continuum of low to high humor, it is diffi cult to make the argument that the clusters of people at either end share a tendency (or lack thereof) for mirth. Rather, their family resemblance may be due to a shared a view that some situations are or are not amenable to humor. Unless respondents are instructed to ignore contextual information when fi lling out the SHRQ, one can not make the argument that the SHRQ is measuring pure person effects or that they can exist. The resulting confusion concerning what drives these scores has implications for scale validation: Because there is little a priori under- standing of what causes individuals’ scale responses, by what method can we say it is measuring what we want it to? The scale’s validity was assessed by computing correlations between it and observed smiles and laughter during an interview, with peer ratings of humorousness, and with mood disturbance, though there is little theoretical reason why these particular scores should be indicators of the same construct. We do not know what might account for between-persons differences in mirth, yet we knew what it should look like.
The HSQ (Martin et al., 2003). The HSQ is a 32-item measure of two dimen- sions of humor styles: intraindividual vs. interindividual and adaptive vs. maladap- tive. The combination of these two dimensions yield four types of reasons for using humor: self-enhancing, affi liative, self-defeating, and aggressive. Self-enhancing humor refers to the tendency to use humor when one is alone to positively cope with adversity; affi liative humor refers to the tendency to use humor to amuse other and increase group cohesiveness; self-defeating humor refers to the tendency to use self-disparaging humor excessively; and aggressive humor refers to the ten- dency to use humor to disparage others. The goal of Martin et al. in constructing the HSQ was to come up with a way to assess both adaptive and maladaptive uses
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of humor, such that one could account for more variance in constructs such as self- esteem and mood disturbance.
The HSQ can be criticized on grounds similar to the SHRQ. Where the SHRQ was faulted for its implicit assumption that individuals do not vary idiosyncratically in the meaning they assign to social situations, the HSQ can be faulted for assum- ing that individuals do not differ idiosyncratically in the meaning they assign to their own behaviors. This is accomplished by positing some high-level trait or goal for humor (e.g., affi liative humor) and then coming up with behavioral indicators for that trait (e.g., “I enjoy making people laugh”) that may not correspond at all to what that behavior means to that individual. This strategy presupposes that any one behavior should correspond one-to-one with intention, when in fact it may not. Two behavioral indicators could have potentially the same meaning to some individuals, yet end up on different subscales. That three of the four subscales of the HSQ overlap suggests that this may in fact be happening. The affi liative subscale correlates .35 with the self-enhancing scale and .26 with the aggressive subscale. The aggressive subscale additionally correlates .23 with the self-defeat- ing subscale. Because goals, intentions, and emotions can be concealed or revealed by behavior, perhaps the only individual who has the ability to decide what those behaviors mean is the individual performing them. Goals that underlie humor should be assessed rather than inferred.
The Need for a Structure and Process Distinction in Humor Assessment
Nomothetic measures such as the HSQ fail to distinguish between various types of structures that may differentially contribute to behavior. This has far-reach- ing implications for a science of personality and humor. Items from the HSQ, for instance, intermix psychological qualities (preferences, capacities, goals, beliefs) generally recognized to be distinct. Consider the fi rst three items from the Self- Enhancing subscale:
2. If I am feeling depressed, I can usually cheer myself up with humor.
6. Even when I’m by myself, I’m often amused by the absurdities of life.
10. If I am feeling upset or unhappy I usually try to think of something funny about the situation to make myself feel better.
Item number 2 refers to an individual’s ability to use humor to self-enhance in the face of depression. Item number 6 refers to a behavior the individual might engage in that has self-enhancing consequences, though that may not have been driven by a self-enhancing motivation. Item 10 refers to an individual’s active attempt at self-enhancement. Because it is likely that there is a difference in the psychology behind what one can do versus what one does versus what one tries to do, treating these structures as functionally similar indicators of an underly- ing goal (self-enhancement) is problematic. First, these may not be the indicators for every individual’s self-enhancing goals, such that for any particular individual, there is the risk that one is aggregating across indicators of many different con-
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structs. Individuals engage in many of the same behaviors, but for different rea- sons. Additionally, by limiting itself to the assessment of four pertinent structures, some of which may be irrelevant to some individuals’ use of humor, the HSQ runs the additional risk of overlooking other highly relevant structures. The suggested solution is to assess structures (e.g., goals, beliefs, preferences) that are relevant to each individual.
Though the HSQ measures structures that give rise to humorous behavior, it ignores the processes through which these goals shape that type of behavior. In particular, it ignores the possibility that a given structure, such as the individual’s goal for using humor, will be activated by only a particular subset of situations – the subset of which may be highly idiosyncratic for each individual. Two individuals may in fact be highly schematic for affi liative humor, but report using humor for affi liative purposes in entirely different settings.
These criticisms of the nomothetic approach to humor assessment suggest that, rather than ignoring the processes involved in the production of humor, there may be value to identifying and assessing them and to using the assessments to pre- dict behavior at the level of the individual. By inquiring about humor and intra- individual personality architecture (Cervone, 2004a), one can model the processes through which humor is used by individuals-in-context.
A Personality-Architecture Strategy for Assessing Humor
The purposes for which humor has previously been assessed (i.e., Martin and col- leagues’ coping, aggressing, affi liating, and self-defeating humor) represent con- structs that should exist at both the level of structure and process. Because these two levels are distinct (cf. Cervone, 2004), the fi rst step of assessment would be to measure individuals’ beliefs about how they use humor in their own daily lives.
Current humor measures (e.g., the HSQ) consist of experimenter-provided catego- ries of the functions of humor to which individuals are asked to fi t themselves. This strategy runs the risk either of asking the wrong questions (i.e., of those to whom these categories are irrelevant) or of being incomplete (i.e., by not assessing all of the possible self-beliefs individuals may have about how or why they use humor).
An alternative strategy better suited for assessing salient beliefs about humor would employ open-ended assessments of individuals’ goals in using humor. A less- structured method would ensure that individuals who use humor for reasons that happen not to be part of an experimenter’s nomothetic assessment system are lost in the mix, leading to false conclusions about their use of humor.
Such an alternative recently has been executed by Caldwell (2005). The goal of this work is idiographically to assesses KAPA mechanisms and self-reports of the likelihood of using humor as an interpersonal strategy in social situations. Indi- viduals are found to display substantial within-person, across-situation variability in humor use, as would be anticipated by the CAPS model of Mischel and Shoda (1995). Furthermore, as is anticipated by the KAPA model (Cervone, 2004a), these intra-individual patterns are found to be predictable, at the level of the individual case, by prior idiographic assessments of people’s enduring knowledge. Specifi cally, beliefs about the functions served by humor and the relevance of those functions
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to particular social situations predict intra-individual variability in humor use. This class of behavior is found to be far less predictable if one relies merely on nomo- thetic assessment schemes that ignore idiosyncracy at the level of the individual (Caldwell, 2005).
This idiographic strategy provides conceptual and methodological tools that can inform questions about personality and humor that simply are not addressed by traditional nomothetic strategies. One can predict to intra-individual variations in the use of humor across contexts. As in Mischel’s reconceptualization of per- sonality, this yields a reconceptualization of “humor styles” in which the style is defi ned in a person–in-context manner that includes unique clustering of situa- tions in which personal beliefs about humor are likely to be activated. Second, individuals will differ from each other in the number and kind of functions they see humor serving in their daily lives. They may indeed spontaneously report that humor serves self-enhancing, aggressive, affi liative, and self-defeating functions, such that at the level of the population, the 4-factor solution that Martin et al.
(2003) found would be replicated. However, this solution may not necessarily fi t any one individual. Finally, individuals may report using humor for more than one purpose in a given situation, such that any one situation can have many humor functions assigned to it. For example, one can imagine an individual for whom a particular situation is relevant to humor as a coping strategy, as a tool for aggres- sion, and as a way to affi liate with others.