Comparison of humor styles and social skills between high school students with and without specific learning disability disorder

Specific learning disability has become the umbrella term for mathematics, reading and written expression disorders in updated DSM-5S. This disorder always has shown itself as a responsible factor in many kinds of academic problems. In addition to enormous academic problems, the disorder can cause many defects in students’ social relationships, especially taking an appropriate humor style. Therefore, it seems there is some differences between students with specific learning disability disorder and normal students. Because of the importance of the issue, aim of this study was to compare humor styles and social skills between high school students with and without specific learning disability disorder. The study design was descriptive and a causal-comparative type. All normal and learning-disabled high school male students of Kerman city (southeastern, Iran) constituted the study population. Eighty students (40 with and 40 without specific learning disability disorder) were selected through convenient sampling method as sample members. All the learning-disabled subjects were met the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for the specific learning disability disorder. Furthermore, In order to comply with ethical principles, informed consent was obtained from participants and as the participation in the study was completely arbitrary; subjects could withdraw from the study whenever they wished. A diagnostic interview, Raven’s IQ test, Colorado learning difficulties (CLDQ), Matson’s social skills, and Martin's humor styles (HSQ) questionnaires were utilized for data collection. The Persian version of each instrument enjoys an acceptable validity and reliability and each of them has been used in many studies conducted in Iran. Before compare the students, Kolmogorov–Smirnov test was used to assess the normality of the distribution and Box's and Leven's test was used to assess the homogeneity of variance-covariance matrices. All the data were analyzed using SPSS software (V. 22), through Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) test. Mean scores of students with specific learning disability disorder in the social skills were significantly lower than normal students were (p<0.001). Meanwhile, the mean scores of students with the specific learning disability disorder were lower than normal students were in self-enhancing humor style (p=0.043), they scored higher mean scores in aggressive (p=0.025) and Self-defeating humor styles (p=0.046). The result also showed that the differences between two groups of the students in the affiliative humor style was not significant (p=0.303). These findings signify that the students with specific learning disability disorder in comparison to the normal students have had a worse condition in perceiving and expressing the social skills. Moreover, they also have preferred negative humor styles such as aggressive and Self-defeating, instead of choosing a positive humor style such as self-enhancing, which is considered as an adaptive humor style. Regarding the fact that having effective contacts with peers, and being socially accepted by them is a good predictor for students’ future academic and social competence, and as the students with specific learning disability disorder have critical defects in employing the healthy humor styles and social skills, paying attention to these variables is of paramount importance.