College students' perceptions about sense of humor and about the use of humor in United States and Russian classrooms

The present study investigated the multidimensionality of a sense of humor construct and the relationships between students' sense of humor and their attitudes toward classroom humor. The sample consisted of U.S. (n = 201) and Russian (n = 293) undergraduate students.;A series of t-tests conducted to investigate cross-cultural differences in terms of sense of humor demonstrated that the MSHS full-scale scores were similar for both samples, whereas there were statistically significant differences on some factors of the MSHS and UHI. However, the differences were minor in magnitude. Both U.S. and Russian students were positive about classroom humor and agreed that it had positive effects on them.;A series of Pearson product-moment correlations revealed that positive attitudes toward classroom humor related to some factors of a sense of humor as measured by MSHS: humor appreciation and coping humor (in both cultures); humor production (in the U.S. sample), and attitudes toward others' humor (in Russian sample).;A series of confirmatory factor analyses revealed that the two humor instruments (i.e., Multidimensional Sense of Humor Scale (MSHS) by Thorson and Powell, 1993a, and Uses of Humor Index (UHI) by Graham, Papa, and Brooks, 1992)--developed in the U.S.--fit the Russian sample.