An investigation of the relationship between presence or absence of anxiety disorder and humor styles in adults

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between presence or absence of anxiety disorder in adults and humor styles that they employ. With this purpose, Humor Styles Questionnaire, Hamilton Anxiety Scale, Beck Anxiety Inventory, Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale, Yale?Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale and Beck Depression Inventory were administered to 129 (78 female, 51 male) adults. In analyzing the data, one-way analysis of variance was used to determine the humor styles of indivuals according to the diagnosis they have taken, two way analysis of variance was used to investigate whether the humor styles significantly differentiate according to the gender and independent samples t-test was utilized to specify the humor styles of participants whether being diagnosed with anxiety disorder or not. To determine the relationship between humor styles and being diagnosed or not, independent samples t-test was used. With the purpose of specifying humor styles and scores taken from the anxiety scales, correlation coefficient between the scales was checked. According to the results, there is no meaningful relations in terms of affiliative, agressive and self-defeating humor styles between participants being diagnosed with anxiety disorder or not, and it was found that self-enhancing humor style significantly differentiate between participants not diagnosed with anxiety and participants diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder or panic disorder. Moreover, negative relations were found between anxiety level and affiliative and self-enhancing styles that are adaptive humor styles; positive relations were found between anxiety level and self-defeating style that is an maladaptive humor style and no relationship was found between anxiety level and agressive humor style. When determining the relations between the humor styles and the state of individuals having diagnosed with anxiety disorder or no psychiatric disorder, individuals diagnosed with anxiety disorder significantly differentiate from those with no psychiatric disorder in terms of the engagement in affiliative, agressive and self-defeating humor styles. Individuals with no psychiatric disorder and those diagnosed with anxiety disorder significantly differentiate from each other in terms of self-enhancing humor style and this difference was found to be in favor of individuals with no psychiatric disorder. While the results support the notion that adaptive humor style is healthy coping skill and partially support the findings that self-enhancing humor style significantly differentiates in healthy individuals, the positive relations between the self-defeating style that is an maladaptive humor style and anxiety level shows consistent findings with literature but these relations don?t support the idea that self-defeating style is employed by anxious people more frequently.Keywords: Humor styles, Obsessive compulsive disorder, Generalized anxiety disorder, Panic disorder, Anxiety disorders.