Humor and resilience: research on how humor builds emotional flexibility and bounce-back ability
In 2009, a team of psychologists at Stanford University showed research participants a series of deeply unpleasant images—car accidents, grieving people, scenes of violence. Some participants were asked to simply observe. Others were instructed to think of something funny about what they were seeing or to imagine a positive outcome to the scene.
The results were striking. Those who found humorous perspectives showed significantly less negative emotional response to the disturbing images, both in their self-reported feelings and in their physiological responses. Their stress recovered faster. Their mood returned to baseline more quickly. Something about the act of finding humor—even in dark material—seemed to build a buffer against emotional disturbance.
This study, conducted by Andrea Samson and James Gross, represents just one piece of a growing body of research into the relationship between humor and resilience. What scientists are discovering challenges simplistic views of both concepts. Resilience isn’t just about toughness or endurance—it’s about flexibility, adaptability, the ability to bend without breaking. And humor, it turns out, may be one of the most powerful tools humans have for developing exactly these capacities.
Defining Resilience: More Than Just Bouncing Back
Before examining how humor contributes to resilience, we need to understand what resilience actually is. The popular conception—bouncing back from adversity—captures part of it, but researchers have developed more nuanced definitions.
Resilience is not the absence of distress. Resilient people still feel pain, fear, grief, and anxiety. What distinguishes them is not invulnerability but rather the ability to experience difficult emotions without being overwhelmed by them, and to recover their equilibrium relatively quickly after disruption.
Psychologist George Bonanno, one of the leading researchers in this field, defines resilience as the ability to maintain stable, healthy functioning after exposure to a potentially traumatic event. Importantly, his research has found that resilience is far more common than previously thought. Most people who experience significant adversity don’t develop PTSD or prolonged depression—they show a resilient trajectory, experiencing temporary distress followed by return to baseline functioning.
Contemporary resilience research emphasizes several key components:
Emotional flexibility refers to the ability to experience a range of emotions and shift between them appropriately. Resilient people aren’t stuck in any single emotional state—they can feel sad when sadness is warranted and shift to lighter emotions when circumstances allow.
Cognitive flexibility involves the capacity to think about situations from multiple perspectives, to reframe interpretations when initial framings aren’t serving well, and to update beliefs based on new information.
Social connectedness matters because resilience isn’t purely individual—it depends on relationships, support systems, and community ties that provide resources during difficult times.
Meaning-making refers to the ability to find or create significance in experiences, even painful ones. People who can construct coherent narratives about their adversity tend to fare better than those who experience suffering as random and meaningless.
Humor, as we’ll see, contributes to all four of these components.
The Empirical Link Between Humor and Resilience
The connection between humor and resilience has been examined across dozens of studies involving diverse populations—combat veterans, cancer patients, disaster survivors, bereaved spouses, healthcare workers, and ordinary people facing everyday stressors. While the research varies in methodology and focus, several consistent findings emerge.
Humor use correlates with resilient outcomes. People who score higher on measures of humor—particularly affiliative and self-enhancing humor styles—tend to show better psychological adjustment following adversity. A 2012 study of tsunami survivors in Sri Lanka found that those who used humor as a coping mechanism showed lower rates of PTSD symptoms and depression. Similar patterns have been observed in studies of combat veterans, first responders, and people recovering from serious illness.
The relationship appears to be causal, not just correlational. Experimental studies, like the Stanford research described above, demonstrate that inducing humorous thinking actually changes emotional and physiological responses—it’s not just that resilient people happen to be funnier. When researchers train people to adopt humorous perspectives, measurable improvements in stress response and mood regulation follow.
Humor predicts resilience prospectively. Studies that measure humor at one time point and then track outcomes over subsequent months or years find that baseline humor predicts later resilient functioning. This suggests humor isn’t just a byproduct of being psychologically healthy—it’s a contributing factor.
The benefits extend beyond mental health. Research has linked humor use to better immune function, lower inflammation, faster wound healing, and reduced cardiovascular reactivity to stress. While we should be cautious about overstating these findings—the effects are often modest and the mechanisms not fully understood—there’s growing evidence that humor’s benefits are not purely psychological.
Mechanisms: How Does Humor Build Resilience?
Understanding that humor and resilience are connected is useful, but understanding why they’re connected is more useful still. Several mechanisms appear to explain the relationship.
Cognitive Reappraisal and Perspective-Taking
The most robust mechanism linking humor to resilience is cognitive reappraisal—the process of changing how you think about a situation in order to change its emotional impact. This is one of the most effective emotion regulation strategies known to psychology, and humor appears to be a particularly powerful form of it.
When you find something funny about a difficult situation, you’re necessarily seeing it from a different angle. You’re noticing incongruities, absurdities, or unexpected framings that weren’t apparent from your initial perspective. This act of perspective-shifting is itself a form of mental flexibility training.
Research by Samson and Gross has shown that humor-based reappraisal produces different effects than other forms of positive reappraisal. In their studies, humor specifically decreased negative emotions without simultaneously decreasing awareness of the situation’s severity. In other words, humor allowed people to feel better about bad situations without going into denial about how bad they were. This combination—maintained awareness plus reduced distress—is precisely what resilience requires.
Psychological Distancing
Related to reappraisal is the concept of psychological distance. Humor creates space between you and whatever you’re facing. By treating something as material for a joke, you’re implicitly stepping back from it, viewing it from outside rather than being trapped inside it.
This distancing function helps explain why gallows humor is so common among people facing serious adversity. The soldier who jokes about combat, the patient who jokes about their diagnosis, the griever who finds absurdity in funeral rituals—all are using humor to create breathing room around experiences that might otherwise be suffocating.
Importantly, psychological distancing is not the same as avoidance or denial. The distance humor provides is typically temporary and chosen—you step back, gain perspective, and can then step back in to engage directly. This controlled oscillation between closeness and distance appears to be healthier than either constant immersion or constant avoidance.
Emotional Flexibility Training
Resilience depends on being able to move between emotional states—to feel sad when sadness is appropriate but not to get stuck there, to experience joy even during difficult periods without feeling guilty about it. Humor may serve as a kind of training ground for this flexibility.
When you laugh in the midst of difficulty, you’re practicing the skill of holding multiple emotional states simultaneously or shifting between them rapidly. The cancer patient who cries and then laughs and then cries again is developing emotional flexibility—the capacity to experience the full range of responses without being locked into any single one.
Research by Bonanno and colleagues has shown that emotional flexibility—specifically, the ability to both suppress and express emotions as context demands—predicts better outcomes following bereavement and trauma. Humor seems to be one of the ways people develop and maintain this flexibility.
Social Resource Building
Resilience isn’t just an individual trait—it depends heavily on social resources. People with strong social support networks fare better after adversity than those who are isolated. Humor plays an important role in building and maintaining these networks.
Affiliative humor—warm, inclusive humor that strengthens bonds—helps people connect, build trust, and create the relationships that will support them through difficult times. When adversity strikes, people who’ve built strong humor-based connections have more resources to draw on.
But humor also helps during adversity itself. Shared laughter among people going through difficult experiences together—fellow patients, colleagues, family members—strengthens group cohesion and creates solidarity. The research on first responders and medical professionals consistently finds that shared gallows humor builds team cohesion that helps these groups function under pressure.
Meaning-Making and Narrative Construction
Humans are storytelling creatures, and our ability to construct coherent narratives about our experiences affects our psychological wellbeing. Humor can be a powerful tool for meaning-making—for finding or creating significance in what happens to us.
A joke about a difficult experience is, in a sense, a very short story with a surprising ending. When people develop humorous perspectives on their adversity, they’re often engaged in the same kind of narrative construction that therapists encourage—finding ways to make sense of what happened, to integrate it into a coherent life story rather than experiencing it as random senseless suffering.
Research on post-traumatic growth (which we’ll explore in the next section) has found that people who can find something redemptive or meaningful in their suffering tend to fare better. While humor doesn’t always provide deep meaning, it can provide a kind of meaning-lite—a way of making experiences coherent and even valuable without requiring full resolution or acceptance.
Physiological Regulation
Resilience has physiological components—the ability to calm down after stress activation, to recover baseline functioning after the fight-or-flight response has been triggered. Humor appears to support these regulatory processes.
Laughter triggers the release of endorphins and activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for the “rest and digest” state that counterbalances stress arousal. Studies have shown that laughter can lower cortisol levels, reduce blood pressure, and decrease muscle tension.
But beyond these immediate effects, regular humor use may train the stress response system to be more flexible and responsive. Just as physical exercise trains the cardiovascular system to recover more quickly from exertion, humor practice may train the stress response system to recover more quickly from activation.
Individual Differences: Why Humor Helps Some People More Than Others
While the research overall supports humor’s role in building resilience, the effects aren’t uniform. Some people benefit enormously from humor-based coping, while others benefit less or even experience harm. Understanding these individual differences can help people find the approaches that work best for them.
Humor Style Matters
As discussed in Chapter 1, people use humor in different ways, and these styles have different implications for wellbeing. The Humor Styles Questionnaire developed by Rod Martin and colleagues identifies four primary styles:
Affiliative humor—warm, inclusive humor used to build connections—consistently predicts positive outcomes. People high in affiliative humor tend to show greater resilience across studies.
Self-enhancing humor—maintaining a humorous perspective on life even in difficult circumstances—is the style most directly linked to resilience. This is essentially humor as a coping mechanism, and research consistently shows its benefits.
Aggressive humor—humor that demeans, attacks, or excludes others—does not show the same positive associations. In fact, it often correlates with worse psychological outcomes, possibly because it damages the social connections that resilience depends on.
Self-defeating humor—excessive self-mockery, using oneself as the butt of jokes to gain others’ approval—is similarly problematic. While it may provide short-term social benefits, it appears to undermine self-esteem over time and correlates with poorer psychological adjustment.
The lesson is clear: not all humor builds resilience. The humor that helps is humor that maintains perspective, builds connection, and preserves dignity—one’s own and others’.
Baseline Mental Health
People who are already struggling with depression, anxiety, or other mental health challenges may not benefit from humor in the same ways that psychologically healthy people do. In some cases, attempts at humor can actually interfere with needed processing of difficult emotions.
Research suggests that humor works best as a complement to other coping strategies, not as a replacement for them. For someone in acute psychological distress, humor alone is unlikely to be sufficient—and pressure to “lighten up” can feel invalidating or dismissive.
Cultural and Individual Preferences
People vary in how much they value and enjoy humor. For those who naturally relate to the world through wit and laughter, humor-based coping feels organic and authentic. For those whose temperament is more serious or whose cultural background doesn’t emphasize humor, these strategies may feel forced or uncomfortable.
Research supports matching interventions to individual preferences. A humor-based approach that works wonderfully for one person may be ineffective or even counterproductive for another. The goal is not to make everyone into comedians but to help people access whatever resources work best for them.
Cultivating Humor for Greater Resilience
For those who want to develop their humor capacity as a resilience resource, research offers some guidance—though with important caveats. Humor can be cultivated, but it can’t be forced. The goal is not to manufacture artificial cheerfulness but to create conditions where genuine humor is more likely to emerge.
Exposure and Practice
Like most skills, humor develops through exposure and practice. Consuming humor—comedy, funny books, humorous podcasts—can help attune your mind to comedic patterns and possibilities. Spending time with people who make you laugh creates opportunities to practice and develop your own humor.
But consumption alone isn’t enough. Active practice matters—actually trying to be funny, telling jokes, finding the absurdity in situations. You don’t have to be good at first. Like any skill, humor develops through attempts, feedback, and refinement.
Playfulness and Exploration
Humor often emerges from a playful relationship with the world—a willingness to explore, experiment, and not take everything seriously. Cultivating general playfulness—through games, creative pursuits, or simply a willingness to be silly—may create fertile ground for humor to develop.
Research on play in adults suggests that those who maintain playful attitudes tend to be more creative, more flexible in their thinking, and better at coping with stress. Playfulness and humor are not identical, but they share psychological terrain.
Seeking Humor in Adversity (Carefully)
One of the most direct ways to develop resilience-building humor is to practice finding it in difficult situations. This doesn’t mean forcing yourself to laugh when you’re genuinely distressed—it means staying open to the possibility that something funny might emerge from even painful circumstances.
Some practitioners recommend a “humor scan”—periodically asking yourself, “Is there anything funny about this situation?” Not as a way of minimizing difficulty, but as a way of staying open to additional perspectives. Sometimes the answer is no, and that’s fine. But sometimes a surprising absurdity reveals itself, and that moment of recognition can provide genuine relief.
Social Humor Practice
Because so much of humor’s resilience-building power comes through social connection, practicing humor with others is particularly valuable. This might mean seeking out friends who share your sense of humor, joining groups that incorporate humor into their activities, or simply being more willing to share your own humorous observations with people around you.
Research on humor in relationships shows that couples who laugh together tend to have more satisfying relationships. The same principle likely applies to friendships, work relationships, and other social connections. Humor shared is often humor amplified—and the bonds it creates become resources for weathering future difficulties.
Humor-Based Interventions
For those who want more structured approaches, several humor-based therapeutic interventions have been developed and studied. These range from “laughter yoga” (combining laughter exercises with yogic breathing) to humor therapy programs that teach specific skills for incorporating humor into coping.
The research on these interventions is mixed. Some show positive effects; others show minimal benefit beyond placebo or standard care. What’s clear is that structured humor interventions help some people but are not universally effective. As with other therapeutic approaches, individual fit matters.
The Limits of Humor as a Resilience Factor
While the research supports humor’s role in building resilience, it’s important not to overstate the case. Humor is one factor among many, and it’s neither necessary nor sufficient for resilient functioning.
Many highly resilient people don’t use humor as a primary coping strategy. They build resilience through other means—religious faith, close relationships, meaningful work, physical activity, therapeutic intervention, or simply time and natural recovery processes. There’s no evidence that these people are doing something wrong or missing out on an important resource.
Conversely, humor alone cannot overcome genuinely overwhelming adversity. Structural factors—poverty, discrimination, lack of access to healthcare—create challenges that individual coping strategies cannot fully address. A humor practice is not a substitute for material resources, social support, or professional help when it’s needed.
The research also suggests that humor’s benefits may have limits. In very severe trauma, or in the acute phase of crisis, humor may be less accessible or less helpful than it is in moderate difficulty or during recovery. The oncology ward may be full of laughter, but the moment of diagnosis often is not—and that’s okay.
Humor Across the Lifespan: Developmental Considerations
Humor’s relationship to resilience may vary across different life stages. Research on child development, adolescence, and aging offers some relevant insights.
In children, humor development tracks closely with cognitive development. Young children appreciate physical humor and simple incongruities; older children develop appreciation for wordplay and more sophisticated forms. Children who develop healthy humor styles—learning to laugh with others rather than at them—may be building resilience resources that will serve them throughout life.
Adolescence brings particular challenges. Teenagers often use humor for identity exploration and peer bonding, but also for aggression and social exclusion. The humor styles established during this period tend to persist, making adolescence a potentially important window for developing healthy humor patterns.
In later life, humor appears to remain protective. Studies of elderly populations find that those who maintain their sense of humor show better psychological adjustment and even better physical health outcomes. Humor may be particularly valuable in helping older adults cope with the losses and changes that accompany aging.
Implications for Therapy and Intervention
The research on humor and resilience has begun to influence clinical practice, though integration into mainstream therapy remains uneven.
Some therapists explicitly incorporate humor into their work, using it to build rapport, model coping, and help clients gain perspective on their difficulties. Others are more cautious, concerned about minimizing client pain or imposing the therapist’s own humor style.
What the research suggests is that humor in therapy—like humor in life—is most helpful when it follows the client’s lead, emerges naturally from the therapeutic relationship, and serves the client’s goals rather than the therapist’s comfort. Forcing humor into therapy is no more helpful than forcing it into other contexts.
Several therapeutic approaches have been developed specifically around humor, including “humor therapy” and “therapeutic humor” interventions. While research on these approaches is still developing, early evidence suggests they can be helpful for some clients, particularly those who naturally relate to the world through humor.
For people in therapy or considering it, the takeaway is not that you should seek out humor-based treatment specifically, but that a therapist who appreciates and can work with your natural humor style may be a particularly good fit—and that exploring humor as a coping resource may be a worthwhile part of the therapeutic process.
The research on humor and resilience ultimately points to something profound about human adaptability. We are not passive recipients of our circumstances—we actively construct our experience of the world, and the lens we use matters enormously. Humor is one of the most powerful lenses available to us.
When we laugh at difficulty, we’re not denying its reality. We’re asserting our capacity to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously—to acknowledge that something is hard while also noticing its absurdities, to feel pain while also feeling something lighter. This is not weakness or avoidance. It is, the research suggests, a sophisticated form of psychological flexibility that predicts better outcomes across a wide range of adversities.
Not everyone will build their resilience through humor. Not every situation calls for laughter. But for many people, in many circumstances, the ability to find something funny may be one of the most valuable psychological resources they possess.
The good news is that this resource can be developed. Unlike some factors that predict resilience—stable childhood, genetic temperament, socioeconomic resources—humor is something you can cultivate. It’s not easy, and it can’t be forced, but it can be practiced, nurtured, and grown.
In a world that reliably supplies difficulty, that’s something worth knowing.
References and Further Reading
Books
Bonanno, G. A. (2009). The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss. Basic Books.
Martin, R. A. (2007). The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach. Elsevier Academic Press.
Southwick, S. M., & Charney, D. S. (2018). Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Frankl, V. E. (1946/2006). Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.
Lefcourt, H. M. (2001). Humor: The Psychology of Living Buoyantly. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Tugade, M. M., Shiota, M. N., & Kirby, L. D. (Eds.). (2014). Handbook of Positive Emotions. Guilford Press.
Research Articles
Samson, A. C., & Gross, J. J. (2012). Humour as emotion regulation: The differential consequences of negative versus positive humour. Cognition & Emotion, 26(2), 375–384. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2011.585069
Bonanno, G. A. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience: Have we underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events? American Psychologist, 59(1), 20–28. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.59.1.20
Bonanno, G. A., Papa, A., Lalande, K., Westphal, M., & Coifman, K. (2004). The importance of being flexible: The ability to both enhance and suppress emotional expression predicts long-term adjustment. Psychological Science, 15(7), 482–487. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00705.x
Martin, R. A., Puhlik-Doris, P., Larsen, G., Gray, J., & Weir, K. (2003). Individual differences in uses of humor and their relation to psychological well-being: Development of the Humor Styles Questionnaire. Journal of Research in Personality, 37(1), 48–75. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0092-6566(02)00534-2
Kuiper, N. A. (2012). Humor and resiliency: Towards a process model of coping and growth. Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 8(3), 475–491. https://doi.org/10.5964/ejop.v8i3.464
Fritz, H. L., Russek, L. N., & Dillon, M. M. (2017). Humor use moderates the relation of stressful life events with psychological distress. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 43(6), 845–859. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167217699583
Edwards, K. R., & Martin, R. A. (2014). The conceptualization, measurement, and role of humor as a character strength in positive psychology. Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 10(3), 505–519. https://doi.org/10.5964/ejop.v10i3.759
Cann, A., & Collette, C. (2014). Sense of humor, stable affect, and psychological well-being. Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 10(3), 464–479. https://doi.org/10.5964/ejop.v10i3.746
Crawford, S. A., & Caltabiano, N. J. (2011). Promoting emotional well-being through the use of humour. Journal of Positive Psychology, 6(3), 237–252. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2011.577087
Papousek, I. (2018). Humor and well-being: A little less is quite enough. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 31(2), 311–327. https://doi.org/10.1515/humor-2016-0114
Tagalidou, N., Loderer, V., Distlberger, E., & Laireiter, A. R. (2018). Feasibility of a humor training for patients suffering from depression: A randomized controlled pilot study. European Journal of Humour Research, 6(4), 100–110. https://doi.org/10.7592/EJHR2018.6.4.tagalidou
Gross, J. J. (2015). Emotion regulation: Current status and future prospects. Psychological Inquiry, 26(1), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2014.940781
Kuiper, N. A., & Martin, R. A. (1998). Laughter and stress in daily life: Relation to positive and negative affect. Motivation and Emotion, 22(2), 133–153. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021392305352
Tugade, M. M., & Fredrickson, B. L. (2004). Resilient individuals use positive emotions to bounce back from negative emotional experiences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86(2), 320–333. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.86.2.320
Abel, M. H. (2002). Humor, stress, and coping strategies. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 15(4), 365–381. https://doi.org/10.1515/humr.15.4.365
Kuiper, N. A., Martin, R. A., & Olinger, L. J. (1993). Coping humour, stress, and cognitive appraisals. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 25(1), 81–96. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0078791