Humor styles across 28 countries

Responses to a measure of the four humor styles of affiliative, aggressive, self-enhancing, and self-defeating from the Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ; Martin et al. Journal of Research in Personality, 37(1), 48–75, 2003) were collected from individuals (N = 8361) in 28 countries encompassing 21 different languages. The purpose of this global collaboration was to examine both differences and similarities of humor styles across nations at the descriptive level. Across the countries, typically the highest scores were for the affiliative humor style. When each humor style was examined, some country samples demonstrated differences in mean scores. For example, the samples from Hungary, Indonesia, South Africa, and Serbia had high self-enhancing scores and Japan scored the lowest. In contrast to mean differences, almost all of the countries demonstrated positive inter-scale correlations, similar sex differences, and similar correlations with age, suggesting more similarities than differences. As discussed, some of the samples had low internal consistency values and poorly fitting factor structures for the humor style scales, suggesting that those results should be interpreted with caution.