Humor appreciation and sensation seeking: Invariance of findings across culture and assessment instrument?

Abstract

It was hypothesized that sensation seeking (SS) is able to predict both the structure and content of jokes and cartoons. Five hypotheses were derived and tested in two samples from Spain and Germany comprising a total of 434 participants. The basic pattern of correlations was replicated for the two samples, and for the different measures of humor appreciation (3-WD, EAHU) and sensation seeking (AISS, SSS). Experience Seeking and Novelty were predictive of low appreciation of incongruity-resolution humor and high appreciation of nonsense humor. Disinhibition and Intensity were positively correlated with funniness of sexual, black, man-disparagement and woman-disparagement humor, and negatively with their aversiveness. When the structure variance from the content categories was removed, the correlations between appreciation of humor contents and sensation seeking increased. This confirmed that structure and content have to be separated both theoretically and empirically in studies of appreciation of content categories.