PSYCHOLOGY AND HUMOR
Many psychologists use Traits, States, and Behaviors in contrasting seriousness with playfulness. Serious people tend to engage; while playful people tend to transcend.
TRAITS: A “serious person” wants to function exclusively in the bona fide mode of communication. This is not true for a “playful person.
STATES: A person can be in a serious/pensive mode, or a playful/silly mood.
BEHAVIORS: A person can tell a joke, or clown around.
Willibald Ruch notes that there are different types of humor. “Affiliative Humor” involves the tendency to say funny things, to tell jokes, and to engage in spontaneous witty banter. “Self-Enhancing Humor” is a coping mechanism. “Aggressive Humor” involves sarcasm, teasing, ridicule, derision, put downs, and/or disparagement; and “Self-Deflecting Humor” is when people allow themselves to be the butt of other people’s jokes. Ruch and many other psychologists are therefore studying “gelotophobia,” and “gelotophilia.”
In the attached PowerPoint, there is a discussion of various emotions, with humorous examples of each: anger, anticipation, curiosity, desire, fear, goofiness, happiness, love, narcicism, sadness, silliness, skepticism, smugness, and surprise. I will also discuss varous types of smiles, as when enjoying a disgusting or frightening film, masking negative emotions of sadness, anger, or fear, flirting, feeling sadistic pleasure, embarrassment, complying to something contemptuous, having mixed emotions, or feeling under social pressure.
There are also different humor styles, as when a person is socially warm vs. socially cold, reflective vs. boorish, competent vs. inept, earthy vs. repressed, benign vs. mean-spirited. We must remember that both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the airplane, and the pessimist invents the parachute. Discuss the importance of humor in the fields of Psychology, and Psychotherapy.
Already Freud was aware of humor as a defence mechanism (his daugther defined defences in more details) or a way to reach the unconscious in case a benevolent superego allowed "the ego to generate humor. A benevolent superego allowed a light and comforting type of humor, while a harsh superego created a biting and sarcastic type of humor. A very harsh superego suppressed humor altogether". (see Wikipedia).
humor is needed to breaking the tense moment especially when counseling session is on going but psychologist needs to be careful because it can broke the client's trust. In my university, sometimes student laugh when they do the counseling session with their friends because there's some funny moment (example when my friend show his weird face). for Pychotherapy, humor is needed to help patients see life in a different perspective .
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