The location of sense of humor within comprehensive personality spaces: An exploratory study

The present paper tries to discover the position of sense of humor in personality space. Several definitions of humor are discussed and a review of studies relating personality and humor is given. The authors' conceptualization of humor is introduced and two studies are presented that tried to locate these humor dimensions within personality space. Our humor tests were given to two samples: these samples also had to answer several multidimensional personality inventories to cover the whole domain of temperament (e.g. EPQ, 16PF, FPI, STPI, SSS-IV and STAI). The Humor scores were correlated with each of the personality variables. The factor compositions of the best predictors for a humor category were used to arrive at a tentative hypothesis of the location of dimensions of humor in personality space. The results show that strong relationships between humor and temperament exist. Some of the hypotheses discussed in the literature were supported, but also some new hypotheses were derived from this study. All in all, the results show that the separation of appreciation of humor into the independent components of funniness and rejection is appropriate since they are located in different parts of the personality space.