It has been suggested that using humor plays important roles as stress moderator and reduces negative emotions in stressful situations. However, it is unknown what kind of humor is more helpful to cope with stress.

The objective of this research is an empirical evaluation of the use of humor as stress moderator.

This study examined the relation between the classifications of produced humor in interpersonal stressful situations and self-reports of stress responses such as depression, anxiety, anger, and helplessness.

The participants were 396 university students. They were shown 3 types of interpersonal stressful situations in the questionnaire, and they were then asked to complete the Stress Response Scale-18 (SRS-18) (Suzuki et al., 1997) and how they would react in order to let those situations go past humorously.

First, the humorous productions were classified into 5 groups based on similarities by coders. Secondly, the numbers of humors in each of the 5 categories were correlated with the scores of SRS-18. For example, there were negative correlations of the numbers of self-deprecating humor with depression-anxiety and helplessness scores for females and the numbers of entertaining humor with helplessness score for males in interpersonal inferiority complex situation.

Certain kinds of humors worked as significant stress buffers depending on the situation or sex. For females, humor involving interaction situations worked particularly well as a stress buffers. These results have clinical implications for the prevention and intervention of stressful experiences.

[Table 1 Bivariate correlation of SRS-18 with humor]