Who gets happier from humor-based wellbeing exercises?
More extraverted women gained more from writing down three funny things each day, but people's baseline sense of humor did not change how much any humor exercise helped.
Source
Who Benefits From Humor-Based Positive Psychology Interventions? The Moderating Effects of Personality Traits and Sense of Humor
Study at a glance
- Design
- RCT — Secondary moderator analyses of two randomised, placebo-controlled online intervention trials with 1-week exercises and follow-ups to 6 months
- N
- Study 1: 104 women who completed all follow-ups (three funny things vs placebo); Study 2: 632 adults who completed all follow-ups, out of 1,472 who started (five humor interventions vs placebo)
- Population
- German-speaking adults recruited via media adverts for a free online strengths training; Study 1 women only
- Outcome
- Happiness (Authentic Happiness Inventory) and depressive symptoms (CES-D) averaged over 1-week to 6-month follow-ups; moderators: Eysenck personality traits (Study 1) and Sense of Humor Scale (Study 2)
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
The authors re-analysed two online trials in which adults were randomly assigned to do a humor exercise for one week (such as writing down three funny things each day) or a placebo task (writing about early childhood memories). Happiness and depressive symptoms were measured before, right after, and at 1, 3 and 6 months. Study 1 tested whether extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism moderated the benefit of the three-funny-things exercise; Study 2 tested whether sense of humor moderated five different humor exercises, and whether early changes in sense of humor predicted later wellbeing.
What they found
In Study 1, higher extraversion went with larger gains in happiness and larger drops in depressive symptoms from the three-funny-things exercise relative to placebo, while neuroticism and psychoticism did not moderate the effect. In Study 2, baseline sense of humor did not moderate the effect of any of the five interventions on happiness or depression. However, increases in sense of humor from baseline to one month predicted later increases in happiness and decreases in depressive symptoms, with the total humor score explaining the most variance in happiness change (a squared multiple correlation of 0.18).
The limits
What it doesn't show
Only people who completed every follow-up were analysed, and more than half of Study 2 participants dropped out, so the samples may favour motivated completers. Study 1 included only women, recruited largely through a women's magazine, so the extraversion effect may not generalise to men. All measures were self-reports, and researchers could not check what participants actually wrote or how faithfully they did the exercises. The link between changes in sense of humor and wellbeing is correlational and does not prove that humor is the mechanism.
Key terms
- Positive psychology intervention (PPI)
- A structured activity designed to boost positive feelings, behaviours or thoughts, such as keeping a gratitude diary.
- Moderator
- A variable that changes the strength or direction of an effect, e.g. an intervention working better for extraverts.
- Placebo control condition
- A comparison task that looks like an intervention but lacks its supposed active ingredient, here writing about early memories.
- Three funny things intervention
- An exercise in which people write down three funny things that happened each day for a week, and why they happened.
- Extraversion
- A personality trait describing sociability, energy and a tendency to seek stimulation and positive emotion.
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Quiz yourself
What was the main humor exercise tested in Study 1?
Common questions
Why might extraverts benefit more from writing down funny things?
Funny moments often happen with other people, so more sociable people may encounter more material to write about, or be prompted to seek more social contact.
Is it bad news that sense of humor didn't moderate the effects?
The authors see it as good news: people with low or high self-rated humor seemed to benefit similarly, so the exercises are broadly accessible.
Does a rise in sense of humor cause improved wellbeing?
Not necessarily. The change in humor predicted later wellbeing, which fits humor being a mechanism, but it is correlational and other factors could drive both.
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