“Am I Glad To See Myself?”: The Self-irony Tendency Task as a Measure of the Tendency to Use Verbal Self-irony for Self-presentation Purposes

In the current chapter, we describe the development and application of the first hypertextual measure to assess the tendency to use self-ironic comments (STT) for self-presentation purposes. Hypertext is understood as a system of non-sequential writing that allows individuals to create and follow their own path and their own meaning of the material. We conducted a study that provides a coherent conceptualization of verbal self-irony, which can be an operant conceptualization due to its consistency with the previous studies on irony. The study included 77 participants from Poland. We hypothesed that the tendency for self-irony is associated with higher levels of self-esteem, self-affirming self-presentation style, humor as a copying strategy, and with lower levels of gelotophobia. The study confirmed the hypotheses about the relationship between the tendency to use self-irony and self-esteem, as well as the relationship between the tendency to use self-irony and the self-affirming self-presentation style.