Sojourn students' humor styles as buffers to achieve resilience

Resilience, which means adjustment under stress, is crucial for sojourn students, who are likely to experience acculturative stress. One possible way of upholding adjustment and resilience is the students' humor practice. Essentially, such practice is possibly able to buffer the stress to achieve resilience. The possibility is the focus of the present study of 215 students coming from Mainland China to study in a university in Hong Kong. Results show that the study and cultural aspects of acculturative stress were most harmful to the student's adjustment. Furthermore, the student's affiliative humor style was most vital in sustaining adjustment and accomplishing resilience under various kinds of stress. These results highlight the merit of affiliation as a principal salutogenic factor derived from humor. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.