Haoui, Nahida (2015) Humour in Therapy: A Descriptive Study. Honours thesis, University of Southern Queensland. (Unpublished)
Abstract
As in everyday social interaction, humour naturally appears in therapy. This thesis explores the debate in the literature on the use of humour in therapy and highlights the need to shift research attention from role or function to descriptive research focussed on explicating its form. Conversation Analysis is used to examine two audio recordings of real-life therapy sessions to identify the practices that shape how client-initiated humour is introduced and responded to by the therapist. This study found that client-initiated humour followed a threepart core sequence of (a) invitation to humour, (b) presenting/receiving the joke, and (c) returning to the therapy talk. Each part takes the form of an invitation-acceptance adjacency pair. An acceptance by the therapist is required at each adjacency-pair in order to progress to the next part. The client-initiated humour was found to be finely attuned to the specific details of the current talk. As a result of these findings the interactional form of humour is more complex than initially thought and is less well understood than some authors suggest. This calls for more exploratory research to be conducted to better understand the three-part core sequence. While the present study has moved the debate on from the admissibility of humour in therapy we are not at a stage where we can train therapists in its use as Franzini (2001) suggests.
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| Item Type: | Thesis (Non-Research) (Honours) |
|---|---|
| Item Status: | Live Archive |
| Additional Information: | Current UniSQ staff and students can request access to this thesis. Please email research.repository@unisq.edu.au with a subject line of SEAR thesis request and provide: Name of the thesis requested and Your name and UniSQ email address |
| Faculty/School / Institute/Centre: | Historic - Faculty of Health, Engineering and Sciences - School of Psychology and Counselling (1 Jan 2015 - 31 Dec 2021) |
| Supervisors: | Steven Christensen |
| Qualification: | Bachelor of Science (Honours) |
| Date Deposited: | 01 Sep 2025 01:40 |
| Last Modified: | 01 Sep 2025 01:40 |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | humour, conversation analysis, therapy |
| Fields of Research (2008): | 17 Psychology and Cognitive Sciences > 1799 Other Psychology and Cognitive Sciences > 179999 Psychology and Cognitive Sciences not elsewhere classified |
| Fields of Research (2020): | 52 PSYCHOLOGY > 5299 Other psychology > 529999 Other psychology not elsewhere classified |
| URI: | https://sear.unisq.edu.au/id/eprint/52382 |
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