The Relationships Between College Students’ Sense Of Humor And Creativity

Humor, or sense of humor is a complex social, psychological phenomenon. Someresearchers think that humor involves cognitive processing, social context, emotionalresponse, and the external expression of the four main components (Martin,2007)[7].There are scholars personality ingredients of humor research, put a sense of humor aredivided into three dimensions (Svebak,1974). The humorous element informationsensitivity (meta-message) and humor preferences (personal liking) representing thecognitive dimension and emotional tendency of humor.Another complex concept in this field is creativity, Koestler (1964) proposed theterm ‘bisociation” which is an individual object found different relationship betweencognitive process, and humor. This process also exists in the appreciation of art andscientific exploration and creative activities. Torrance (1966) will also be humor as astandard he made creative picture test reference. Although scholars have studied humorand creativity of the contact. However, there have not been studies of humor cognitivedimension and creative connections.This study used two questionnaires to measure60American students. Amongthem, a sense of humor questionnaire-6(SHQ-6, Svebak,1996) and Torrance creativitytest-picture test (TTCT-Figural, Torrance,1966) will be used to test the sense of humorand creativity. Two dimensions in SHQ-6: element information sensitivity and humorpreferences can be used for further analysis of the relationship between orientation andindividual creativity level choose cognitive dimension and personal sense of humor.Research results show that, College Humor element information sensitivity andhumor preferences and creativity were significantly positively correlated; meta-messagesensitivity of humor and personal liking of humor can somehow predict individuals’variation of creativity.