Humor is an effective strategy in regulating emotion. Whereas most previous studies have investigated the correlational relationship between self-directed humor and mental health, it is largely unknown whether self-directed humor causally regulates emotions. The purpose of this study is to examine the causal effect of two types of self-directed humor (self-enhancing vs. self-defeating) on emotion regulation. Initially, participants (N = 75, M_age = 20.31 ± 1.19 years, 62.67% female) were asked to immerse themselves in negative scenes by reading paragraphs. They then rated their feelings of positive and negative emotions before and after reading sentences of different conditions (including baseline, cognitive reappraisal, self-enhancing humor, and self-defeating humor) that randomly matched the scenes. Humor feelings for strategies were rated in the last stage. Results of ANOVA indicated that compared to the baseline, participants experienced an increase in positive emotion and a decrease in negative emotion in the other three conditions. Self-enhancing humor was the most effective in regulating emotion, whereas no significant difference was observed between self-defeating humor and cognitive reappraisal. Furthermore, participants reported that the feeling of humor from self-enhancing humor was higher than from self-defeating humor, as well as from cognitive reappraisal than in the baseline. Mediation analysis suggested that the difference in humor feelings might be due to the changes in positive and negative emotions caused by different conditions. In short, the findings demonstrate that different styles of self-directed humor can causally regulate emotions, and this paper provides new evidence for using self-directed humor to improve emotional well-being.

幽默是调节情绪的有效策略。尽管之前的大多数研究都调查了自我导向幽默与心理健康之间的相关关系，但自我导向幽默是否会因果调节情绪在很大程度上尚不清楚。本研究的目的是检验两种自我导向幽默（自我增强与自我挫败）对情绪调节的因果影响。最初，参与者（N  = 75，M_年龄= 20.31 ± 1.19 岁，62.67% 女性）被要求通过阅读段落沉浸在负面场景中。然后，他们在阅读随机匹配场景的不同条件的句子（包括基线、认知重新评估、自我增强幽默和自我挫败幽默）之前和之后评估自己的积极和消极情绪感受。最后阶段对策略的幽默感进行了评估。方差分析的结果表明，与基线相比，参与者在其他三种情况下经历了积极情绪的增加和消极情绪的减少。自我增强的幽默在调节情绪方面最有效，而自我挫败的幽默和认知重新评估之间没有观察到显着差异。此外，参与者报告说，自我增强幽默带来的幽默感高于自毁幽默带来的幽默感，认知重新评估带来的幽默感也高于基线。中介分析表明，幽默感的差异可能是由于不同条件引起的积极和消极情绪的变化所致。简而言之，研究结果表明，不同风格的自我导向幽默可以因果调节情绪，本文为利用自我导向幽默改善情绪健康提供了新的证据。