Sunday, April 24, 2016

Daren Bradshaw - Blog #5


Humor in Every Day Life

 
For my last blog I was really unsure what to write about to be honest. After contemplating for a while I decided to do another on humor, except this time it was not about my favorite comedian it is simply about humor as it relates to life. Humor is thought to be a fundamental, intrinsic part of human nature, experienced in nearly every type of interpersonal relationship and having a far-reaching impact on daily life (Lefcourt, 2001; Martin, 2007). Having said that, it seems as though it would be easy to relate it to everyday life in more ways than one. Humor helps in times of stress and anxiety by lightening the mood of different situations. Humor can bring individual together in times of conflict or just difficult times in general. For example, as discussed in class, the nonviolent movement used humor to combat its violent opponent time and time again. Not only was the group successful in achieving their goal they simultaneously made the aggressive bad guys look flat out silly. The use of humor made it hard for their opponents to even reply much less retaliate. I decided to do a survey amongst family and friends asking them if they had ever used humor to lighten the mood of two different types of situations. Of the 8 people that I surveyed all but one had said they used humor to combat two totally different situations. Most of them even stated that they reacted with humor without even thinking about it. This just goes to show that this is something that comes natural to a lot of people. Sure everyone might have a different sense of humor but in the end it always seems to have a positive result on whatever the situation is at hand.

 
People Surveyed

Alex Solis, Phil Bradshaw, Joe Bider, Debbie Bradshaw, Rachael Goebel, Sam Price, Justin Woodall and Patrick Turner.

 
References

Lefcourt, H. M. (2001). Humor: The psychology of living buoyantly. New York, NY: Kluwer Academic. 10.1007/978-1-4615-4287-2

Martin, R. (2007). The psychology of humor: An integrative approach. New York, NY: Academic Press.

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