Self-enhancing humor: an antidote for perfectionists’ stress coping

Perfectionists often experience elevated stress levels due to their tendencies toward compulsions, rigidity, and the relentless pursuit of unrealistically high standards. Humor has proven to be an effective coping mechanism for stress; however, the type of humor employed plays a crucial role. Hence, it is valuable to explore whether perfectionists effectively utilize humor strategies to manage stress. Additionally, it is important to determine which humor styles are most beneficial for them. Through four studies, we aimed to demonstrate the effectiveness of humor strategies for stress relief among perfectionists. Studies 1 and 2 utilized the Chinese version of the Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (CFMPS), the 32-item Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ), and the Trait Anxiety Inventory (TAI) in cross-sectional analyses. In Studies 3 and 4, we employed the stressful movie paradigm and a stressful life event recall paradigm to induce stress in a laboratory setting, manipulating perfectionism and humor separately. The findings indicated a positive association between perfectionism and both self-enhancing and self-defeating humor, with adaptive perfectionism being more closely linked to self-enhancing humor and maladaptive perfectionism to self-defeating humor. Both the cross-sectional and laboratory studies demonstrated that self-enhancing humor was more effective in relieving stress for perfectionists than self-defeating humor.