Communibiology and Humor

Abstract

Participants ( N = 323) at a midsized university in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States completed self-report measures: personality factors (psychoticism, extraversion, and neuroticism) and communicative functions of humor (identification, clarification, enforcement, and differentiation). Analyses of structural models indicated that psychoticism predicted clarification, enforcement, and differentiation humor. Extraversion predicted identification, enforcement, and differentiation humor. Neuroticism was not observed as a significant predictor of the humor functions. The results offer support for the communibiological paradigm, which argues that neurobiological personality factors meaningfully account for the ways in which individuals communicate.