Abstract
This manuscript explores one romantic partner’s humor use and the resulting embarrassment felt by the other partner using coorientation theory. Self-report and partner perception data were gathered from 106 couples (N = 212) in romantic relationships, and two coorientation variables were calculated. Actor—Partner Independence Models estimated the relationships between four humor styles and partner embarrassment. Aggressive humor was related to partner embarrassment and self-defeating humor with feeling embarrassed by one’s partner. For women, perceived similarity in aggressive and self-defeating humor mitigated embarrassment, and greater understanding of men’s self-defeating humor was related to embarrassment. In Study 2, a 2 × 2 experiment (N = 222) tested whether self-defeating humor predicts embarrassment or whether embarrassment predicts self-defeating humor use, with results supporting the former.
Keywords
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
