Cheerfulness and Everyday Humorous Conduct
Cheerfulness and Everyday Humorous Conduct

Summary/Abstract: Trait cheerfulness, seriousness, and bad mood have been proposed to form the temperamental basis of humor. Bypassing the vague folk concept of the “sense of humor” they are expected to predict humor-related thoughts, feelings, and actions just like the sense of humor should. The State-Trait-Cheerfulness-Inventory that measures these three concepts both as states (STCI-S; Ruch et al., 1997) and traits (STCI-T; Ruch et al., 1996) is introduced. To test the underlying assumptions the trait part of the State-Trait-Cheerfulness-Inventory (STCI-T; Ruch et al., 1996) was administered to 105 adults together with two lists of everyday humor behavior, the HUMOR (Manke, 2007) and the self- and peer-administered Humorous Behavior QSort Deck (HBQD; Craik, Lampert, & Nelson, 1996) in Study I. In Study II 169 adults filled in the STCI-T together with the rating form of the HBQD and the Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ; Martin et al., 2003). It turned out that the STCI-T is predictive of many but not all of the self- and peer-reported humor behaviors. Trait cheerfulness is strongly correlated with the socially warm, affiliative, self-enhancing humor style and use of humor in everyday life, and also predictive of competent, earthy, and selfdefeating humor. Low trait seriousness is involved in the prediction of the major humor styles but also is involved in earthy and aggressive humor and predicted the frequency of everyday humor interactions (HUMOR). Bad mood is involved in the prediction of major humor styles (negatively) and also predicts inept, repressed and mean spirited humor and has incremental validity in the prediction of self-defeating humor. Taken together these results support the view that traits forming the temperamental basis of humor are able to predict everyday humorous behavior demonstrating their utility as a valid alternative to the folk concept of the sense of humor. Nevertheless, neither the STCI-T nor a direct measure of the sense of humor could predict all humor behaviors. An adaptation of the scale and its first use in Romanian samples is described. Psychometric characteristics are encouraging and some validity information recommends the use of the scale with Romanian participants.

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