How Do Emotional Restrictions Affect the Use of Humor? A Behavior Genetic Analysis of Alexithymia and Humor Styles

This article reports the first behavioral genetic study of relationships between alexithymia and four styles of humor: affiliative, self-enhancing, self-defeating, and aggressive. A total of 509 MZ pairs and 264 DZ pairs of twins completed the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 (TAS-20) and the Humor Styl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Twin research and human genetics 2015-04, Vol.18 (2), p.138-141
Main Authors: Atkinson, Breanna E., Lipton, Debra, Baughman, Holly M., Schermer, Julie A., Harris, Juliette, Vernon, Philip A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Affective Symptoms - genetics
Affective Symptoms - physiopathology
Aged
Alexithymia
Emotional intelligence
Emotions
Environmental factors
Female
Genetic analysis
Genetic factors
Humans
Humor
Likert scale
Male
Middle Aged
Personality
Questionnaires
Twin studies
Twins
Twins, Dizygotic - genetics
Twins, Monozygotic - genetics
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Summary:This article reports the first behavioral genetic study of relationships between alexithymia and four styles of humor: affiliative, self-enhancing, self-defeating, and aggressive. A total of 509 MZ pairs and 264 DZ pairs of twins completed the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 (TAS-20) and the Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ). Consistent with our predictions, alexithymia correlated negatively with affiliative and self-enhancing humor and positively with self-defeating and aggressive humor. All but one of the 16 phenotypic correlations that we report are significant at the 0.01 level. Also consistent with our predictions, the phenotypic correlations between alexithymia and humor styles were primarily attributable to correlated genetic factors and to a lesser extent to correlated non-shared environmental factors. Correlated shared environmental factors had no significant effect. Implications and limitations of this study are discussed.
ISSN:1832-4274
1839-2628
DOI:10.1017/thg.2014.89