Gender Differences in the Relationship Between Humor and Self Esteem.

According to research on the topic of humor, there are four identifiable styles. Affiliative humor refers to the use of humor to attract attention and establish relationships, while self-enhancing humor reflects the ability to take a humorous view of one’s personal life. Aggressive humor is used as a way of criticizing people. Lastly, self-defeating humor refers to made to jokes made at one’s own expense, usually used as a defense to hide true feelings. Based on previous research, men tend to have higher levels of self esteem than women in Western Civilization. In addition, a study conducted in Spain showed that men have more capability than women to display all four humor styles. However, other research indicates that women tend to display self enhancing and self defeating humor more, while men display more affiliative and aggressive styles. The goal of this proposed study was to research the difference in humor styles between genders, and how there may be a correlation between self esteem and certain humor styles. Approximately 50 participants recruited from classes at Dominican University and from Facebook completed a Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ) to see if certain humor styles are more commonly used by men or women. Next, participants completed the Rosenberg Self Esteem Scale in order to measure self esteem. While the data collection has not been fully completed, it is expected that men will score higher for aggressive and affiliative humor, while women will score higher with self enhancing or self defeating humor. It is also expected that there will be a positive correlation with higher scores in self esteem measurement, the affiliative humor style, and the self enhancing humor style, while there will be a negative correlation with lower scores in self esteem measurement, the self defeating humor style, and the aggressive humor style