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Early Maladaptive Schemas and Adaptive/Maladaptive Styles of Humor

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Abstract

Early maladaptive schemas (EMSs) are thought to act as templates for information processing which influence individuals’ emotional reactions to life situations and their styles of interpersonal relating. The association between EMSs and psychopathology is also believed to be mediated by the use of maladaptive compensatory coping and deficits in adaptive coping (e.g., avoidance, surrender). As styles of coping, humor may be such a mediator. This study examined correlations between domains of the Young Schema Questionnaire-Short form and subscales of the Humor Styles Questionnaire. A number of EMS domains were associated with reduced use of adaptive affiliative and self-enhancing humor styles and increased use of maladaptive self-defeating humor. In addition, the maladaptive aggressive style of humor was associated with the EMS involving insufficient self-control. The relationship between most EMS domains and depressed mood was mediated by both self-enhancing and self-defeating humor styles.

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Notes

  1. Schemas have been defined in a number of ways, but most definitions incorporate the idea that they consist of both structure (i.e., an organizational component) and content (Ingram et al. 1998). As such, our view is that “early maladaptive schemas” (and other accessible beliefs) are really proxies of the self-schema as they do not provide information about the organization of this cognitive content.

  2. It is important to note that self-defeating humor is associated with low self-esteem and is conceptually distinct from the concept of “self-deprecating humor”, which involves not taking oneself too seriously and being able to make light of one’s faults and mistakes in a self-accepting manner. This is a more healthy form of humor and is a component of affiliative humor.

  3. We are not able to conclude that our findings speak to depression or its vulnerability because we assessed depressive severity in an unselected sample of undergraduate students using the BDI-II. Nonclinical samples may simply capture the experiences associated with general negative affect (e.g., neuroticism, fatigue, dysphoria, transient distress) rather than depression per se. As such, we use the term “dysphoria” or “self-reported depressive severity” to describe this construct (see Kendall et al. 1987; Haaga and Solomon 1993).

  4. The reported data analyses were conducted on the combined data from males and females. Further analyses were also carried out on the data for females and males separately. The pattern of simple correlations among all the variables was very similar for males and females as for the total sample. The mediation analyses for females revealed a pattern of significant results that were nearly identical to those for the total sample. However, the mediational analyses for males revealed only one significant effect (Self-Enhancing humor mediating the relationship between Disconnection and BDI-II). This was likely due to reduced power resulting from a much smaller sample size for males than for females. However, further research with a larger sample of males is needed to explore the possibility of a different pattern of mediating effects for males.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This funding is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

    David J. A. Dozois & Rod A. Martin

  2. St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton and McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada

    Peter J. Bieling

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, Westminster Hall, 361 Windermere Road, Rm. 313, London, ON, Canada, N6A 3K7

    David J. A. Dozois

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  1. David J. A. Dozois
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Correspondence to David J. A. Dozois.

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Dozois, D.J.A., Martin, R.A. & Bieling, P.J. Early Maladaptive Schemas and Adaptive/Maladaptive Styles of Humor. Cogn Ther Res 33, 585–596 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-008-9223-9

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