A Longitudinal Characterization of Typical Laughter Development in Mother–Child Interaction from 12 to 36 Months: Formal Features and Reciprocal Responsiveness

Mazzocconi, Chiara; Ginzburg, Jonathan

doi:10.1007/s10919-022-00403-8

Cited by 14 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 113 publications

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“…However, the findings that laughter is more frequent among speakers than listeners and occurs more in response to nonhumorous comments than humorous comments challenged the putative fixed link between humor and laughter (Provine, 2001). Echoing Provine's work, this special issue showcases two papers that employed behavioral observation (as opposed to self-report) and yielded similarly novel and perplexing findings (Haviva & Starzyk, 2022;Mazzocconi & Ginzburg, 2022).…”

Section: A Brief History Of the Science Of Laughtermentioning

confidence: 94%

“…Despite the ubiquity and importance of laughter, there is very little exploration into the developmental trajectory of laughter in young children. In the first paper of the special issue, Mazzocconi and Ginzburg (2022) conducted a longitudinal investigation of a small sample of children from 12 to 36 months and noted that 12-month-old infants and their mothers have unique laughter profiles. Over time, however, infant laughter frequency increased and the patterns of child-mother laughter converged, possibly reflecting infants' greater attunement with their caregivers and increased cognitive abilities (e.g., Theory of Mind).…”

Section: Summary Of Articles In This Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

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Introduction to the Special Issue of the Scientific Study of Laughter: Where We Have Been, Current Innovations, and Where We Might Go From Here

Farley

2022

J Nonverbal Behav

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In his pioneering work, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin (1872/1965) argued that laughter was the outward expression of mirth. In the 150 years since the publication of this book, research has revealed that laughter is substantially more complex, nuanced, and socially important than Darwin theorized. The current special issue highlights recent discoveries regarding the nature of laughter and illuminates numerous themes. These include the importance of both representational and constructionist accounts of laughter, the value of studying naturally-occurring laughter "in the wild," evoked in a variety of contexts (including contexts likely to elicit derisive laughter), and the critical advantage of pre-registration and other open science practices for improving our scientific understanding of laughter.

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Section: A Brief History Of the Science Of Laughtermentioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Summary Of Articles In This Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction to the Special Issue of the Scientific Study of Laughter: Where We Have Been, Current Innovations, and Where We Might Go From Here

Farley

2022

J Nonverbal Behav

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“…However, laughter mimicry is not a purely automatic response: it is influenced by context (Bryant, 2020), interactional partner (Smoski & Bachorowski, 2003), object of the laughter 1 (Jefferson, Sacks, & Schegloff, 1977), and by the developmental stage of the interactants. In motherinfant interactions, laughter mimicry is more frequent in caregivers than in children (Nwokah et al, 1994;Cohn & Tronick, 1987;Mazzocconi & Ginzburg, 2022b). In a longitudinal study from 12 to 36 months, a decrease in laughter mimicry produced by mothers was observed over time, which suggests a negative correlation between it and the communicative skills of children (Mazzocconi & Ginzburg, 2022b).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…In motherinfant interactions, laughter mimicry is more frequent in caregivers than in children (Nwokah et al, 1994;Cohn & Tronick, 1987;Mazzocconi & Ginzburg, 2022b). In a longitudinal study from 12 to 36 months, a decrease in laughter mimicry produced by mothers was observed over time, which suggests a negative correlation between it and the communicative skills of children (Mazzocconi & Ginzburg, 2022b). The same study reported that at around 36 months, mother and child reach more balanced patterns in terms of laughter reciprocity, responding to each other approximately 20% of the time.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…Despite the pragmatic complexity observed in adults (Mazzocconi et al, 2020), laughter emerges in infancy around three months of age (Nwokah, Hsu, Dobrowolska, & Fogel, 1994;Sroufe & Wunsch, 1972), a developmental stage when the same level of elaborated adult pragmatic reasoning (as briefly described above) cannot be expected. Growing evidence suggests that changes in laughter use correlates with the development of socio-cognitive skills of babies and children (Mazzocconi & Ginzburg, 2022b, 2022aMireault & Reddy, 2016;Martin, 2010). Even when considering exclusively its occurrence in relation to humorous stimuli, laughter can offer a precious, early window into the cognitive development of babies (Mireault & Reddy, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Differences between Mimicking and Non-Mimicking laughter in Child-Caregiver Conversation: A Distributional and Acoustic Analysis

Mazzocconi¹,

O’Brien²,

Haddad³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Despite general agreement that laughter is crucial in social in- teractions and cognitive development, there is surprisingly lit- tle work looking at its use through childhood. Here we inves- tigate laughter in middle childhood, using a corpus of online calls between child and parent and between the (same parent) and another adult. We focus on laughter mimicry, i.e., laugh- ter shortly following laughter from the partner, and we com- pare mimicking and non-mimicking laughter in terms of dis- tribution and acoustic properties using spectrotemporal modu- lation measures. Our results show, despite similar frequencies in laughter production, different laughter mimicry patterns be- tween Parent-Child and Parent-Adult interactions. Overall, in comparison with previous work in infants and toddlers, our results show laughter mimicry is more balanced between par- ents and school-age children. At the acoustic level, we observe differences between mimicking and non-mimicking laughter in children, but not in adults. Moreover, we observe signifi- cant differences in laughter acoustics in parents depending on whether they interact with children or adults, which highlights a strong interlocutor effect on laughter mimicry.

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Laughter Meaning Construction and Use in Development: Children and Spoken Dialogue Systems

Mazzocconi

2022

HCI International 2022 - Late Breaking Papers. Multimodality in Advanced Interaction Environments

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In the current work a brief overview of some studies conducted on laughter taking a multidisciplinary perspective will be presented. The integration of analyses of corpus data, theoretical and formal insights, behavioural experiments, machine learning methods, and developmental data, turned out to be fruitful to gain insight into laughter behaviour and on how its production contributes to our conversations. A crucial claim emerging from the studies presented is that laughter conveys propositional meaning interacting with other modalities, in a manner akin to other content bearing words. The implications that such results have for the implementations of more competent, from a semantic and pragmatic perspective, spoken dialogue systems will be outlined. Especially the qualitative and quantitative analysis of developmental data will offer the basis for the proposal of some specific applications.

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A Longitudinal Characterization of Typical Laughter Development in Mother–Child Interaction from 12 to 36 Months: Formal Features and Reciprocal Responsiveness

Cited by 14 publications

References 113 publications

Introduction to the Special Issue of the Scientific Study of Laughter: Where We Have Been, Current Innovations, and Where We Might Go From Here

Introduction to the Special Issue of the Scientific Study of Laughter: Where We Have Been, Current Innovations, and Where We Might Go From Here

Differences between Mimicking and Non-Mimicking laughter in Child-Caregiver Conversation: A Distributional and Acoustic Analysis

Laughter Meaning Construction and Use in Development: Children and Spoken Dialogue Systems

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