It is only over the last two to three decades that the professional literature has reflected a growing interest in therapeutic humor. The purpose of this project was to design and implement a training workshop in therapeutic humor that would give psychotherapists practical techniques to utilize in their clinical work. This research represented the only attempt known to this author in receiving post-test ratings both from the workshop participants as well as from their clients. Due to the field setting nature of the study, it was of a quasi-experimental design. A total of twenty-one therapists and sixty-one clients participated in the study. The three-hour training covered such therapeutic humor techniques such as joke-sharing to enhance client/therapist rapport, telling jokes and stories with metaphoric messages, and aiding clients to become more aware of life's absurdities. The workshop was given varied mental health settings. Pre-test scores on the Situational Humor Response Questionnaire (SHRQ) and the Revised Questionnaire on the Sense of Humor (RQSH) revealed no significant difference between the clinicians who enrolled in the workshop and those who participated as control subjects. Within the limitations of the design, post-test scores appeared to reveal a significant difference between the workshop and control clinicians, with those who attended the training reporting a higher usage of the humor techniques that were covered. Responses on the client post-tests indicated that patients of the workshop clinicians who took the humor questionnaires in the pre-test reported a higher frequency of humor in their sessions than did the patients of the control clinicians. The two pre-test questionnaires failed to predict which clinicians would be more apt to use therapeutic humor. There was a significant negative correlation between the RQSH sub-scale that measured affective inhibition and clinicians' reports of humor implementation. Among the humor techniques offered in the training, telling metaphoric jokes and stories produced higher frequency reports among experimental subjects.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-1542 |
| Date | 01 January 1997 |
| Creators | Yonkovitz, Ernest Edward |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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