Children's Laughter and Emotion Sharing With Peers and Adults in Preschool

Abstract

The present study investigates how laughter features in the everyday lives of 3–5-year old children in Swedish preschools. It examines and discusses typical laughter patterns and their functions with a particular focus on children's and intergenerational (child-adult/educator) laughter in early education context. The research questions concern: who laughs with whom; how do adults respond to children's laughter, and what characterizes the social situations in which laughter is used and reciprocated. Theoretically, the study answers the call for sociocultural approaches that contextualize children's everyday social interaction, e.g., in different institutions or homes, to study the diverse conditions society forms for learning, sociality, and socialization and development of shared norms. Methodologically, the study makes use of mixed methods: it uses descriptive statistics that identify prevalent patterns in laughter practices and, on the basis of these results, examines social-interactional situations of children's laughter in detail. It was found that children's laughter tended to be directed to children and adults' laughter tended to be directed to adults. Eighty seven percent of children's laughter was directed to other children, and adults directed their laughter to other adults 2.7 times as often as to children. The qualitative interaction analysis shows that children and adults exhibited different patterns of laughter. Children primarily sought and received affiliation through laughter in the peer group, and the adults were often focused on the institutional and educational goals of the preschool. Overall, the study shows that intergenerational reciprocal laughter was a rare occurrence and suggests that laughter between generations is interesting in that it can be seen as indicative of how children and adults handle alterity in their everyday life. By deploying multiple methods, the present study points to the importance of viewing emotion and norm sharedness in social interaction not just as a matter of communicating an emotion from one person to another, but as an intricate process of inviting the others into or negotiating the common emotional and experiential ground.

Interpersonal Regulation Questionnaire (IRQ): Psychometric properties and gender differences in Chinese young adolescents.

“…To use emotion sharing in social networks as an example, individuals tend to share positive emotions generally more often than negative emotions (Lewenberg et al, 2015), and share negative emotions more frequently in smaller networks (e.g., among close friends) while positive emotions more in large networks (Burke & Develin, 2016). Moreover, some researchers note that compared with negative emotions, positive emotions have received much less research attention (Cekaite & Andrén, 2019; MacIntyre & Vincze, 2017). Consequently, the exploration of both positive and negative emotions is warranted in the field of IER.…”

Developmental trajectory of humor and laughter in children

“…Humor has a role in promoting sharing behaviors in children (Krogh, 1988;. Children of 3-5 years show laughter and emotional sharing at least three times more with peers than with adults in their everyday lives (Cekaite & Andrén, 2019). In an empirical study on 20 children aged between 31-49 months, who watched cartoons laughed eight times more through imitation (Brown, Wheeler, & Cash, 1980) than when they watched the cartoons alone (Addyman et al 2018).…”

Enacting Emotion: Embodied Affective Stance in a Medical Education Fiction Seminar

“…Researchers have begun to demonstrate the various ways in which emotion 'displays' are not only part of social actions but also an action in themselves; they make certain responses relevant and appropriate (Childs & Hepburn, 2016;Sorjonen & Peräkylä, 2012). For instance, research has examined the relevance of eye gaze and embarrassment during medical examinations (Heath, 1988), the prosodic features of crying within telephone helplines (Hepburn, 2004), and the interactional and multimodal organisation of: sighs (Hoey, 2014), surprise (Cleverly et al, 2012;Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 2006), children's laughter (Cekaite & Andrén, 2019), frustration and embarrassment (Sandlund, 2004), visible deflation (Clift, 2014), anddisappointment (Couper-Kuhlen, 2009).…”