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Genetic and Environmental Contributions to Humor Styles: A Replication Study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 February 2012

Philip A. Vernon ,
Rod A. Martin ,
Julie Aitken Schermer ,
Lynn F. Cherkas  and
Tim D. Spector
Philip A. Vernon*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada. [email protected]
Rod A. Martin
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.
Julie Aitken Schermer
Affiliation:
Management and Organizational Studies, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.
Lynn F. Cherkas
Affiliation:
Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology Unit, King's College London, St. Thomas' Hospital, London, United Kingdom.
Tim D. Spector
Affiliation:
Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology Unit, King's College London, St. Thomas' Hospital, London, United Kingdom.
*
*Address for correspondence: P. A. Vernon, Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.

Abstract

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One thousand and seventy three pairs of adult monozygotic (MZ) twins and 895 pairs of same sex adult dizygotic (DZ) twins from the United Kingdom (UK) completed the Humor Styles Questionnaire: a 32-item measure which assesses two positive and two negative styles of humor. MZ correlations were approximately twice as large as DZ correlations for all four humor styles, and univariate behavioral genetic model fitting indicated that individual differences in all of them can be accounted for entirely by genetic and nonshared environmental factors, with heritabilities ranging from .34 to .49. These results, while perhaps not surprising, are somewhat at odds with a previous study that we conducted in North America (Vernon et al., in press) in which genetic factors contributed significantly to individual differences in the two positive humor styles, but contributed far less to the two negative styles, variance in which was instead largely due to shared and nonshared environmental factors. We suggest that differences between North American and UK citizens in their appreciation of different kinds of humor may be responsible for the different results obtained in these two studies.

Type
Articles
Information
Twin Research and Human Genetics , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , 01 February 2008 , pp. 44 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008