Contemporary approaches to understanding humor have developed models that underscore the importance of both adaptive and maladaptive humor styles. The expression of these humor styles can then impact either positively or negatively on the self or others. One such model, as recently proposed by Rod Martin and his colleagues, outlines four distinct humor styles; namely self-enhancing, affiliative, self-defeating, and aggressive humor. Several studies with both adults and older adolescents provide initial empirical support for this model, including the adaptive aspects of self-enhancing and affiliative humor, as well as the maladaptive components of self-defeating and aggressive humor. However, these four humor styles have yet to be considered with respect to children. As such, the present paper considers how these different humor styles may bear on peer relationships and bullying during middle childhood (ages 6–12). In our examination, we describe how adaptive and maladaptive humor styles may either help or hinder the child's status within a peer group. Special emphasis is directed towards potential relationships between specific humor styles and either peer acceptance or victimization, as well as both direct and indirect forms of bullying. We conclude by describing several potential areas of research that may prove beneficial in furthering our understanding of humor and social relationship issues in middle childhood.

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Past research suggests that sense of humor may play a role in anxiety. The present study builds upon this work by exploring how individual differences in various humor styles, such as affiliative, self-enhancing, and self-defeating humor, may fit within a contemporary research model of anxiety. In this model, intolerance of uncertainty is a fundamental personality characteristic that heightens excessive worry, thus increasing anxiety. We further propose that greater intolerance of uncertainty may also suppress the use of adaptive humor (affiliate and self-enhancing), and foster the increased use of maladaptive self-defeating humor. Initial correlational analyses provide empirical support for these proposals. In addition, we found that excessive worry and affiliative humor both served as significant mediators. In particular, heightened intolerance of uncertainty lead to both excessive worry and a reduction in affiliative humor use, which, in turn, increased anxiety. We also explored potential humor mediating effects for each of the individual worry content domains in this model. These analyses confirmed the importance of affiliative humor as a mediator for worry pertaining to a wide range of content domains (e.g., relationships, lack of confidence, the future and work). These findings were then discussed in terms of a combined model that considers how humor styles may impact the social sharing of positive and negative emotions.

Financial pressures on institutional health care in Canada in recent years have led to substantial pressures on institutional psychological services. These pressures have resulted in the elimination or substantial diminution of psychological services in some of these institutions, including the discontinuation of many longstanding psychology internship programs. It is therefore important for psychologists to demonstrate their cost-efficiency in delivering services. However, evidence for this efficiency in the current Canadian context is lacking. This investigation examines the costs and clinical activities of the interns and staff at a major Canadian teaching hospital in order to determine the degree to which the internship is a cost-efficient method of delivering services. The results indicate that there is a small increased cost to having the services delivered through an internship program. The results are viewed as part of a balanced scorecard approach to the evaluation of an internship program. From such a perspective, other factors can be seen as balancing out the slightly increased cost. Also, a number of strategies are outlined for increasing internship cost-efficiency.

The present study compared Muslim-Arab women in Israel who initiated divorce (n 5 45) with those who stayed in stressful marital relationships (n 5 46). Based on an ecological approach and using a cross-sectional design, we explored the differences between the two groups with regard to the following variables: personal resources (education, paid employment, hardiness, styles of coping with stressful situations, and egalitarian gender role ideology), spousal variables (evaluation of marital difficulties), and environmental resources (formal and informal support from the environment). The findings revealed that levels of education and rates of participation in the labor force were higher among the divorced women than among those who stayed in stressful marriages. In addition, the divorced women had a more egalitarian gender role ideology and tended to adopt problem-focused styles for coping with stressful situations, whereas the married women tended to combine emotion-focused and problem-focused styles. The main difficulty experienced by the divorced women was the husbands' violence, whereas the married women primarily experienced difficulties related to the husbands' alcoholism or drug addiction. In light of the findings, practical recommendations are presented. C