The role of humor in building resilience among Syrian refugee adolescents

Research on refugee mental health have long been assessed by absence or presence of psychopathology symptoms, with a deficit-based approach. However, the resilience framework offers a paradigm shift towards a strengths-based approach for understanding at-risk individuals' mental health. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to explore Syrian refugee adolescents' mental health by incorporating psychopathology and resilience and determine the role of humor in this relationship. Building on the previous work, this paper highlights the importance of humor style perspective which accounts for both positive and negative functions of humor and considers its implications on resilience and psychopathology problems of intrusion, aversion, depression, anxiety and stress. Humor style model claims that humor needs to be examined based on positivity/negativity and being towards the self/others. To measure humor, resilience and psychopathology; 506 Syrian refugee adolescents were administered a questionnaire set in public schools and temporary education centers in Istanbul. The Children's Revised Impact of Event Scale (CRIES-8), Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS-21), Humor Style Questionnaire (HSQ) and Child and Youth Resilience Measure Revised (CYRM-R) were the self-report instruments utilized in the study. Descriptive statistics, multivariate analysis of variance, Pearson's correlation, partial correlation and hierarchical multiple regression were used to reveal the predictors of trauma-related psychopathology problems. The findings of the study revealed a significant change in the psychopathology symptoms due to age but not sex. Moreover, lower negative humor and higher resilience predicted lower psychopathology symptoms. The present study adds to the growing body of research which argues that resilience framework offers a unique way of assessing refugee mental health. Moreover humor as a multidimensional construct interacted with resilience and psychopathology in the current study. Culture-specific differences have been observed specifically in HSQ which requires further inspection.