The organizational fool: balancing a leader's hubris. Do share…. A 2 × 2 ANCOVA was performed with humor and prudence as independent variables and the rule breaker scores as a dependent variable (and gender and age as covariates). All participants attended voluntarily, and all students provided the permission of their parents or legal guardians beforehand in writing or by clicking a control question at the beginning of the online assessment session. The first Oblimin rotated factor was loaded by four items and was interpreted as “Identified as the class clown” as the salient loadings refer to having adopted a class clown role in class (α = 0.87). The number of class clowns in the sample varied in previous studies and may be as low as 3% (Damico and Purkey, 1978) and as high as 21% (Priest and Swain, 2002).

I've seen this phrase used in the context of narcissism a few times, and it certainly applies to me. When the job is a calling: the role of applying one's signature strengths at work. Furthermore, a second distinction was made depending on prudence was among the top 12 strengths or lower 12 strengths3. doi: 10.1177/001872679004300804, Littman-Ovadia, H., and Steger, M. (2010). I modelled myself on a friend who was much brighter than me, but also very self deprecating. I'm not sure how consciously I built my class clown persona, but I always describe the process in that way. This type of class clown behavior might be seen as less disturbing by the teachers and it might even be the humor that is welcome also in schools.

They always stand out in a room full of people. It is concluded that different types of class clowns need to be kept apart and need different attention by teachers. Humor is a vehicle for producing amusement, which, if someone lacks prudence/temperance, also gets expressed in a setting where it might not be appropriate or even gets sanctioned. These are commonly called “class clowns.” Students that take on this role may disrupt class with their jokes and wisecracks, may make silly noises or pull weird faces, bump into imaginary walls, copy the teacher behind their back, and may make wild comments that gets the whole class laughing uproariously. View all

A classy woman is very ambitious, powerful and intelligent. Third, strengths should be in balance and the combination of strengths might be a fruitful venue of study. All participants firstly filled in the VIA-Youth and then proceeded to the measures assessing the class clown behaviors, satisfaction with life and the orientations to happiness.

But figuring out what makes their clowning tick is more complicated, and it has actually been the aim of several psychology studies.

Analyses of the 24 character strengths of the VIA-Youth (Park and Peterson, 2006) showed that class clowns were high in humor and leadership, and low in strengths like prudence, self-regulation, modesty, honesty, fairness, perseverance, and love of learning.

(2002). We expect that the scores get higher with time.

J. Happiness Stud. While humor predicted life satisfaction, class clowning tended to go along with diminished satisfaction with life. On the contrary, a classy woman is about being kind and having everything to flaunt but choosing not to show it. Even if humor is a signature strength of a person, he or she will not necessarily engage in class clowning, for example if humor is balanced out by strengths of temperance.

Generally the school setting will favor strengths like perseverance, love of learning, prudence, self-regulation, teamwork and social intelligence (Weber and Ruch, 2012; Weber et al., submitted) and students having these strengths among their signature strengths will thrive in this context more easily than those who don't. Furthermore, the class clowns do have strengths, and one of the dimensions goes along with even several strengths. There are several reasons to study of dimensions of class clown behavior within a framework of the good character. Wendy, do you find that you go on to the point where you know you're irritating people, but you just find it irresistible to say something funny? Psychol., 30 September 2014 Should the dimensional approach be applied in the future more research is needed on defining and justifying cut-off scores. Finally, partial correlations show that removing humor (in addition to age and gender) does not substantially reduce the correlation between the FUPC and the life of pleasure (r = 0.22; p < 0.001); i.e., the liking of pleasure of class clowns goes beyond the effects of humor. Nine out of 80 students (i.e., 11.25%) were nominated at least once. Table 1 shows that the first unrotated factor loaded on all items, and the coefficients range from 0.51 to 0.74 (median = 0.65).

There was no bimodality in the distribution of scores and no visible heap of class clowns at the upper end of the distribution. Sense of humor and styles of everyday humorous conduct. Factor scores for the factors of leadership, temperance, intellectual, transcendence, and other-directed strengths (cf.

The simultaneous study of all 24 individual strengths and the five strengths factors will allow drawing a more differentiated picture of the strengths (or lack of strengths) of class clowns beyond the domains where hypotheses exist. Ah, very similar in many ways. The third issue relates to the search of characteristics of class clowns: School behavior or general character strength? These strengths are considered to be distinguishable routes to displaying one or more of the virtues. A correlation of this index and the total score of the remaining 16 items yielded a coefficient of 0.66 (p < 0.001). Class clowns traditionally were studied as a type concept and identified via sociometric procedures. Finally, life satisfaction tended to correlate negatively with all class clown dimensions (Hypothesis 9). We propose to study class clown behavior at two levels. Some pros and … The VIA-Youth proved to be reliable and valid (e.g., Park and Peterson, 2006; Ruch et al., 2014). A questionnaire approach has not been pursued so far and it needs to accommodate several observations found from sociometric studies (using teachers and peers).

How about some diversity?

Goldberg, 2006). Doing it all backwards: the development of hierarchical factor structures from the top down. Action Teach. Reston, VA: ERIC Clearinghouse. Res. From Table 3 it is clear that class clown behavior did go along with a life of pleasure; i.e., class clowns follow the principle of hedonism and maximize pleasure (Hypothesis 2). Damico and Purkey (1978) concluded that “… [a]dolescent clowns were found to have many behaviors and personal assessments in common with adult wits. That’s why they’re so entertaining.

This lady is ambitious and she has many goals that she aims to achieve, no excuses accepted. The correlations were high and significant, clearly demonstrating the class clowns yield higher scores overall (r = 0.47), identified as class clown (r = 0.55), the comic talent (r = 0.39), the disruptive rule-breaker (r = 0.36), and the subversive joker (r = 0.39). Assess. A total score is computed by averaging all items to indicate how strongly students display class clown behavior. Cronbach alpha was 0.73, 0.71, and 0.77 in the present sample. J. Res. Thus, strengths aimed at fostering healthy communities and at the acquisition of knowledge might be less developed. My humour, sometimes self deprecating, is something that I started to develop around the age of 13, because being pompous and self righteous wasn't doing me any favours.

A hierarchical model of class clown behaviors was developed distinguishing a general factor and the four positively correlated dimensions of “identified as a class clown,” “comic talent,” “disruptive rule-breaker,” and “subversive joker.” Analysis of the general factor showed that class clowns were primarily male, and tended to be seen as class clowns by the teacher. Hence Hypothesis 1 states that class clown behaviors will correlate negatively with temperance strengths (e.g., prudence, self-regulation, endurance). The correlations with the strengths factors gave a clear pattern of results. Just clowning around: classroom perspectives on children's humour. This finding is interesting, as humor as a strength may generate positive emotions and improve social relations. 12, 231–240. This “excess of humor” is not measured through the VIA-IS.

Maybe the concept of use of signature strengths will be important in this context. In the next step they identified 24 character strengths (i.e., processes and mechanisms that lead to the virtues), namely appreciation of beauty, bravery, creativity, curiosity, fairness, forgiveness, gratitude, honesty, hope, humor, kindness, leadership, love, love of learning, modesty, open-mindedness, perseverance, perspective, prudence, religiousness, self-regulation, social intelligence, teamwork, and zest. Furthermore, it seems that intellectual strengths and pursuing a life of engagement are protective factors against disruptive rule breaking (Hypothesis 5, Hypothesis 6). doi: 10.1027/1015-5759/a000133, Keywords: class clown, character strengths, VIA-Youth, signature strengths, life satisfaction, positive psychology, Citation: Ruch W, Platt T and Hofmann J (2014) The character strengths of class clowns. There are 7–9 items per character strength (about one third of the items are reverse coded) in a 5-point Likert-style format (from 1 = not like me at all to 5 = very much like me). Using this class clown status index one can state that 12.7% of the participants in the samples considered themselves to be class clowns. The mode was 2.22 (“disagree”) with only few high scorers.