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Humor Coping Reduces the Positive Relationship between Avoidance Coping Strategies and Perceived Stress: A Moderation Analysis
Humor is considered an adaptive coping strategy as it could reduce the burden of perceived stress and increase positive emotional states when dealing with stressful situations. Humor has been reported in several models as a rather independent strategy that can be correlated with both approach-based...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
MDPI
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9952361/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36829408 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/bs13020179 |
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author | Simione, Luca Gnagnarella, Camilla |
author_facet | Simione, Luca Gnagnarella, Camilla |
author_sort | Simione, Luca |
collection | PubMed |
description | Humor is considered an adaptive coping strategy as it could reduce the burden of perceived stress and increase positive emotional states when dealing with stressful situations. Humor has been reported in several models as a rather independent strategy that can be correlated with both approach-based coping strategies and avoidance-based coping strategies. Humor can be defined as a hedonistic escapism strategy that would work better in the presence of unpredictable or uncontrollable stressors, such as the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and its related confinement measures. Therefore, during such a stressful event, humor would have increased the positive effect of the approach coping style on mental health and reduced the negative effect of the avoidance coping style. Based on this hypothesis, we conducted a cross-sectional study with a moderation analysis in which we assessed the interaction of humor with both approach-based and avoidance-based coping styles on perceived stress in a large sample of Italian participants collected in April and May 2021. Despite some limitations related to sampling and study design, the results obtained partially support our hypothesis, as we observed that humor had a significant moderating effect on the relationship between avoidance coping and psychological distress, with a reduction of perceived stress while using such a coping style in the presence of a medium to high level of humor. On the other hand, we did not observe a significant moderating effect of humor on the relationship between the approach coping style and perceived stress. In general, our results support the beneficial effect of humor on mental health and highlight a special role for humor as a moderator of other coping strategies. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9952361 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | MDPI |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-99523612023-02-25 Humor Coping Reduces the Positive Relationship between Avoidance Coping Strategies and Perceived Stress: A Moderation Analysis Simione, Luca Gnagnarella, Camilla Behav Sci (Basel) Article Humor is considered an adaptive coping strategy as it could reduce the burden of perceived stress and increase positive emotional states when dealing with stressful situations. Humor has been reported in several models as a rather independent strategy that can be correlated with both approach-based coping strategies and avoidance-based coping strategies. Humor can be defined as a hedonistic escapism strategy that would work better in the presence of unpredictable or uncontrollable stressors, such as the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and its related confinement measures. Therefore, during such a stressful event, humor would have increased the positive effect of the approach coping style on mental health and reduced the negative effect of the avoidance coping style. Based on this hypothesis, we conducted a cross-sectional study with a moderation analysis in which we assessed the interaction of humor with both approach-based and avoidance-based coping styles on perceived stress in a large sample of Italian participants collected in April and May 2021. Despite some limitations related to sampling and study design, the results obtained partially support our hypothesis, as we observed that humor had a significant moderating effect on the relationship between avoidance coping and psychological distress, with a reduction of perceived stress while using such a coping style in the presence of a medium to high level of humor. On the other hand, we did not observe a significant moderating effect of humor on the relationship between the approach coping style and perceived stress. In general, our results support the beneficial effect of humor on mental health and highlight a special role for humor as a moderator of other coping strategies. MDPI 2023-02-16 /pmc/articles/PMC9952361/ /pubmed/36829408 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/bs13020179 Text en © 2023 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
spellingShingle | Article Simione, Luca Gnagnarella, Camilla Humor Coping Reduces the Positive Relationship between Avoidance Coping Strategies and Perceived Stress: A Moderation Analysis |
title | Humor Coping Reduces the Positive Relationship between Avoidance Coping Strategies and Perceived Stress: A Moderation Analysis |
title_full | Humor Coping Reduces the Positive Relationship between Avoidance Coping Strategies and Perceived Stress: A Moderation Analysis |
title_fullStr | Humor Coping Reduces the Positive Relationship between Avoidance Coping Strategies and Perceived Stress: A Moderation Analysis |
title_full_unstemmed | Humor Coping Reduces the Positive Relationship between Avoidance Coping Strategies and Perceived Stress: A Moderation Analysis |
title_short | Humor Coping Reduces the Positive Relationship between Avoidance Coping Strategies and Perceived Stress: A Moderation Analysis |
title_sort | humor coping reduces the positive relationship between avoidance coping strategies and perceived stress: a moderation analysis |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9952361/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36829408 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/bs13020179 |
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