The use of sexual humor in romantic relationships: Description, valence and association with sexual satisfaction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research shows that humour is related to relationship satisfaction, but little is known about couples’ use of sexual humour. The current study examined sexual humour use and its associations with relational humour, relationship satisfaction, and sexual satisfaction. Participants (adults in a romantic relationship of at least 4 months; N = 196) completed online measures of the frequency, nature, and perceptions of sexual humour use, relational humour use, relationship satisfaction, and sexual satisfaction, and they described an example of sexual humour their partner had used. Participants indicated that sexual humour was used at least occasionally with their partner. Examples of sexual humour suggest several common forms (e.g., inside jokes/rituals, physical humour, smoothing over awkward moments). Most participants perceived positive consequences of sexual humour, including increased comfort, fun, and closeness. More frequent use of positive relational humour (by self and partner) was associated with more frequent and more positively valenced sexual humour, whereas more frequent negative relational humour use by partner predicted lower relationship and sexual satisfaction. Finally, more positively valenced sexual humour predicted sexual satisfaction over and above relationship satisfaction and relational humour. Relationship and sexual humour are related to both relationship and sexual satisfaction. Sexual humour may help mitigate discomfort with potentially awkward situations and facilitate individual comfort as well as connection with a partner. The unique contribution of sexual humour to sexual satisfaction suggests it may play a modest but distinctive role in sexual well-being. Implications and future directions are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".