Funny Students Cope Better: Patterns of Humor Enactment and Coping Effectiveness

Abstract

Increasingly, college students are employed in jobs outside of class—and contend with additional stressors as a result—when they attempt to balance work and academic demands. Enacting humorous communication is one productive way to handle such stress. In a college student, the replication of the process of using humor to cope with job stress (i.e., higher humor orientation, HO) was associated with higher ratings of effectiveness, greater self-perceived coping effectiveness, and subsequently with higher job satisfaction. Path analysis demonstrated that, as the transactional theory would predict, students' trait HO influences their job satisfaction through its effect on heightened coping efficacy. Results indicated that, across two very different sample populations, college students and fully employed adults are extremely similar in the process and benefits of using humor to cope.

Keywords:

• Coping
• Emotional Expressivity
• Humor Orientation
• Job Satisfaction

Notes

Nurses were more likely to write an example of humor (80%) compared to student respondents, but the nurse samples had higher rates of declining to participate in the entire study. Therefore, the nurses who did respond were probably more compliant and/or motivated.

If all 186 respondents were included, even those who did not describe any humor event, the correlation was .18 (p < .05).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Melanie Booth-Butterfield

Melanie Booth-Butterfield (Ph.D., University of Missouri, 1985) is the McConnell Professor of Speech Communication

Steven Booth-Butterfield

Steven Booth-Butterfield (Ed.D., West Virginia University, 1988) Healthyinfluence.com.

Melissa Wanzer

Melissa Bekelja Wanzer (Ed.D., West Virginia University, 1995) Canisius College Professor.