Humour Perception and Creation between Parents and 3‐ to 6‐month‐old Infants

Abstract

Humour and laughter are universal to the human psychological experience and have serious developmental and evolutionary implications. Despite the early emergence of laughter in infancy, infants have been largely ignored in the humour research and humour has been largely ignored in the infant research. The present study describes the emergence of humour perception and creation in a sample of 20 parent–infant dyads who were followed from ages 3‐to‐ 6 months. The study examined how infants discover that absurd nonverbal behaviour, known as ‘clowning’, is amusing in the context of social engagement with caregivers. Results indicate that parents primarily use clowning when attempting to amuse their infants and pair these behavioural absurdities with affective cues like smiling and laughing. As they got older, infants were more likely to laugh and smile in response to clowning. Infants' ability to create humor via clowning also increased with age, starting with simple shrieks at 3 months to imitating absurd actions by 5 months. These increases are partly potentially explained by accompanying increases in parental smiling, laughing and clowning in response to infant clowning. Future research should employ more diverse samples and experimentally investigate the role of parental affect and social referencing in infants' interpretation of absurd behavior. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An Overview of Humor

“…These outrageously novel actions captivate infants' attention, but are not necessarily perceived as humorous. So parents do something else that is equally important: in the midst of their raucousness, they smile and laugh themselves, thereby wrapping their incongruous behavior in a safe and playful social context that allows their absurdity to be experienced as funny (Mireault et al 2012a). By the time infants are six months old, they almost require such absurdity to be amused, meaning that wild violations of social behavior are more likely to incite them to laugh or smile.…”

“…Regardless of language or culture (and barring developmental delay), smiling and laughter emerge at about the same time for infants across the globe, beginning with the endogenous or reflexive smile at (and indeed before) birth, progressing to the social smile at about six weeks of age, and evolving into robust belly laughs by three to four months (Mireault et al 2012a;Sroufe and Wunsch 1972). However, infant laughter is only part of infant humor.…”

“…By the time infants are six months old, they almost require such absurdity to be amused, meaning that wild violations of social behavior are more likely to incite them to laugh or smile. Just three months earlier, they were happy enough to smile at being smiled at (Mireault et al 2012a). In that short amount of time, infants have observed the typical behavior of others and developed expectations about social behavior based on these observations, which when violated in the playful context created by caregivers, is cause for laughter (Pien and Rothbart 1980;Sroufe et al 1974;Sroufe and Wunsch 1972).…”

“…Perhaps not surprisingly, when asked to make their babies laugh, parents act wildly absurd (Mireault et al 2012a). They make odd noises and faces, blow on the infant's hair or face, or pretend to eat the infant's toes, for example.…”

Humor and Its Socio-Emotional Emergence

“…Infants eventually perceive clowning as humorous, and certainly by six-months it becomes the most effective means of eliciting their smiles and laughs. This change of heart may be due to caregivers consistently communicating the humorous nature of clowning via their own smiles and laughs, which they typically pair with their bizarre behavior (Mireault et al 2012). It also reveals the growing sophistication in infant humor perception even just between three and six months.…”