| Summary: | 碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 臨床心理學系碩士班 === 104 === Background: Personality vulnerability traits are predisposing factors of depression. Individuals with high levels of dependency and self-criticism use maladaptive affect-regulation strategies, particularly in the context of interpersonal relationships. Humor may serve as an affect-regulation strategy: It has the function of reducing negative emotion and increasing positive emotion. However, only few past studies have explored personality vulnerability traits in relation to humor styles.Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to explore the potential mediating role of humor styles in the relationship between personality dimensions and depressive symptoms. The current study hypothesized that humor styles would mediate the relationship between dependency/self-criticism and depressive symptoms.
Method: Participants included 332 college students (104 man and 228 women). At both baseline and follow-up 2-month, participants completed The Depressive Experiences Questionnaire (DEQ), Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ), and The Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CES-D).
Results: Dependency/self-criticism were negatively correlated with benign humor styles, and positively with injurious humor styles. Depressive symptoms were negatively correlated with benign humor styles, and positively with self-defeating humor style. Results of longitudinal mediation analyses indicated that low levels of benign humor mediated the relationship between dependency/self-criticism and depressive symptoms. However, injurious humor styles did not mediate the relationship between the two.
Conclusion: Individuals with high levels of dependency (i.e., fearing of rejection and abandonment) and self-criticism (i.e., excessive personal standards) tend not to use benign humor styles, such as saying funny things to facilitate relationships and using of humor as an emotion regulation, which may lead to increased levels of depressive symptoms. In addition, results revealed that injurious humor styles did not mediate the relationship between dependency/self-criticism and depression symptoms in Chinese culture. Implications are discussed.
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