Introductory Comments: Special Issue of EJOP (August 2010) on Humor Research in Personality and Social Psychology

Authors

  • Nicholas A. Kuiper

Abstract

Welcome to this special humor issue of Europe’s Journal of Psychology. This August 2010 EJOP issue is devoted to a presentation of contemporary psychological research on humor, with a particular emphasis on work that targets the personality and social aspects of humor, including stress, coping and well-being.
This special issue can be placed into a broader context by noting that we are currently enjoying a psychological renaissance in research on humor. Each year, an increasing number of scientific articles are being published about the psychological aspects of humor. This is clearly seen in Table 1, which provides one rough index of humor publications in psychology over the past thirty years. This was done by searching in PsychINFO, using the term “humor,” across a sequence of one-year time periods (beginning in 1980), and then advancing in five year increments. Thus, starting in 1980, there was a grand total of 47 publications on psychological aspects of humor in all of that year, with 25 of these being in peer-reviewed journals. Moving forward, we begin to see a slow but steady increase in humor research, reaching an overall total of 119 works published in 1995, with the majority of these now in peer-reviewed sources (88).