ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to test one aspect of the assumed relationship between humor and anxiety. It provides the prediction that the more anxiety a humor stimulus produces, the greater is the likelihood that it will evoke a painful rather than a gratifying response. Psychiatric and nonpsychiatric groups of subjects were compared with respect to their responses to a series of popular humorous cartoons, comprising the Mirth Response Test. Ratings were made for all 31 cartoons in the original test. An analysis of variance technique was applied to the disturbingness ratings of the 20 cartoons in order to estimate the interrater reliability. Rank order correlations between the disturbingness ranks of the cartoons and the “dislike” ranks showed correlations of.74 for the patient population and —.03 for the normal controls. The patients were found to dislike significantly more of the humorous cartoons than did the controls.
