Off-campus UMass Amherst users: To download dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your UMass Amherst user name and password.

Non-UMass Amherst users, please click the view more button below to purchase a copy of this dissertation from Proquest.

(Some titles may also be available free of charge in our Open Access Dissertation Collection, so please check there first.)

Program evaluation of a therapeutic humor training workshop

Ernest Edward Yonkovitz, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Abstract

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.

Subject Area

Academic guidance counseling|Psychotherapy

Recommended Citation

Yonkovitz, Ernest Edward, "Program evaluation of a therapeutic humor training workshop" (1997). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9737599.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9737599

Share

COinS