Humor and anxiety.

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Abstract
Psychoanalytic literature, recognizing a relationship between humor and anxiety and emphasizing the aggressive and sexual, as well as the nonsensical, aspects of humor, led to the experimental question whether Ss differentiated on the basis of a self-rated anxiety scale respond differently to humorous stimuli. Based upon a general anxiety questionnaire, extreme groups of 28 high anxiety and 28 low anxiety Ss containing equal numbers of men and women were selected. Cartoons selected from the Mirth Response Test were presented to each S one at a time in a standardized order that intermingled the various content categories of aggression, sex, and nonsense. There was a relationship found between S''s rating of his susceptibility to anxiety and his preference for cartoons of aggressive content, and this relationship was seen to depend upon the social context of the humor stimuli. To a lesser extent there was also a relationship between anxiety, preference, and social context in the case of nonsensical cartoons.

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