Spitefulness and humor styles Jennifer K. Vrabel, Virgil Zeigler-Hill ⁎, Rachel G. Shango Department of Psychology, Oakland University, 212A Pryale Hall, Rochester, MI 48309, United States abstract article info Article history: Received 9 August 2016 Received in revised form 26 September 2016 Accepted 1 October 2016 Available online xxxx The aim of the present study was to examine the association between spitefulness and humor styles. To examine this association, 539 participants completed self-report measures assessing their spitefulness, basic personality dimensions, and humor styles. Spitefulness was positively correlated with the injurious humor styles (i.e., aggres- sive humor and self-defeating humor) and negatively associated with the benign humor styles (i.e., affiliative humor and self-enhancing humor). Taken together, these findings show that spiteful individuals are more likely to belittle, degrade, and harm others and themselves by employing injurious humor styles. These findings extend our knowledge regarding the connections between personality traits and humor styles. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Spite Spitefulness Personality Humor Humor styles HEXACO 1. Introduction Spitefulness is often defined as the degree to which an individual is willing to incur a cost in order to inflict harm on another individual (e.g., Hamilton, 1970). An example of spitefulness would be someone who takes an especially long time to disembark an airplane after she feels rushed by an impatient passenger behind her. This intentional delay costs the woman a small bit of her own time but it inflicts harm on the impatient passenger. Behavioral economists and evolutionary bi- ologists have studied spitefulness for a variety of reasons including the possible role that it may play in the emergence of cooperation (e.g., Rockenbach & Milinski, 2006). Despite the potential importance of spitefulness for understanding certain aspects of social behavior (e.g., cooperation, fairness), it has not been examined very closely by psy- chologists until recent years. One reason for the recent interest in spite- fulness is that the motivations of spiteful individuals appear to be more complex than simply accruing immediate benefits and avoiding imme- diate costs because spiteful individuals are willing to incur costs (and forgo benefits) in order to inflict harm on others (see Marcus & Norris, 2016, for an extended discussion). Although the origins of spitefulness remain unclear, a variety of possible explanations for the persistence of spitefulness in the population have been offered such as inclusive fit- ness (Hamilton, 1970), reputational benefits for individuals engaging in spiteful acts (Kurzban, DeScioli, & O'Brien, 2007), and relative gains for spiteful individuals when the costs they incur are less than the harm they inflict on others (Jensen, 2010). Individual differences in spitefulness have been found to be associat- ed with a variety of aversive characteristics such as potentially patho- logical personality features (e.g., Marcus, Zeigler-Hill, Mercer, & Norris, 2014), low levels of guilt (Marcus et al., 2014), emotion regulation diffi- culties (Zeigler-Hill & Vonk, 2015), and difficulties understanding the mental states of others (Ewing, Zeigler-Hill, & Vonk, 2016). Overall, these findings show that individuals with high levels of spitefulness are more likely to engage in behaviors that are aggressive or antagonis- tic and appear to have relatively little concern for the consequences of their actions for other individuals. The emerging characterization of spiteful individuals – such as their relative lack of concern for others – led us to consider the possibility that spitefulness may be associated with the humor styles that individuals adopt. That is, the willingness of individuals with high levels of spitefulness to inflict harm on others – and incur costs to themselves – may be reflected in the types of humor that these individuals employ. Freud (1905/1960) proposed that humor can be used as an uncon- scious way to express aggression. More recently, humor has been found to have both intrapersonal and interpersonal functions (see Martin, 2010 for a review). For example, individuals often use humor to comfort themselves (e.g., Carroll & Shmidt, 1992) or initiate social in- teractions (e.g., Yip & Martin, 2006). Despite humor having many posi- tive consequences such as enhancing relationships (Allport, 1961) and decreasing negative emotional states (Goldstein, 1987), it is also impor- tant to note that there is a dark side to humor. In particular, the darker aspects of humor concern individuals inflicting harm on others (e.g., be- littling an individual or a group) or themselves (e.g., diminishing one's own abilities; Baron, 1978). Overall, an individual with high levels of spitefulness may utilize the more harmful forms of humor in order to in- flict costs on others. The present study examined the connections that Personality and Individual Differences 105 (2017) 238–243 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: zeiglerh@oakland.edu (V. Zeigler-Hill). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.10.001 0191-8869/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. 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