Humor plays a big role in romantic relationships and is one of the more sought after personality traits that individuals are searching for in their partners. Humor can have both useful or harmful effect on a relationship. Researchers have defined two groups of humor, positive and negative. Positive include affiliative and self-enhancing humor, which are positively correlated to relationship satisfaction and perseverance, and with indicators of psychological and social well-being. Negative humor styles, aggressive and self-defeating, show reverse patterns. The purpose of our research was to show the connection between the use of four humor styles and relationship satisfaction. We assumed, that positive styles would be positevely correlated and negative styles negatively. Our study involved 841 participants, 662 women and 179 men who were asked to complete an online survey consisting of Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ) and Relationship Assessement Scale (RAS). We found positive correlation between relationship satisfaction and self-enhancing humor and negative correlation between relationship satisfaction and self-defeating humor. Furthermore, we found a positive correlation between affiliative humor and relationship satisfaction in married couples. In couples, that were not married, we found positive correlation between self-enhancing humor and relationship satisfaction. As expected, the study found that men significantly more commonly use all four humor styles. Self-enhancing and self-defeating humor also showed good predictive value of relationship satisfaction. The results are fairly consistent with the reviewed literature, but for even better results, a more specific form of Humor Styles Questionnaire should be used. In this study, we measured the use of humor in general and in would be better to use a version that measures specific use of humor in romantic relationships.
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