Wellbeing
Who gets happier from humor-based wellbeing exercises?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
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)
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Key findings
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).
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
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