Neuroscience
Few sounds can be as heart-warming as a chuckling toddler. Often they're laughing at a joke you or someone else has performed, but what about their own attempts at humour? To find out, Elena Hoicka and Nameera Akhtar filmed 47 parent-child pairs (just five involved dads) playing for ten minutes with various toys. The kids were English-speaking and aged between 2 and 3 years.
Coding of the videos revealed 7 forms of humour performed by the toddlers: using objects in an unconventional way (e.g. brushing a pot); deliberately mislabelling things (e.g. holding a cat but saying "here's a fish"); making deliberate category errors (e.g. making a pig go "moo"); breaching taboos (e.g. spitting and saying "that's disgusting"); performing funny bodily actions (e.g. falling back and putting their legs in the air); tickling and chasing; and playing peekaboo.
There were signs of maturing humour abilities. The three-year-olds more often made conceptual humour than the two-year-olds, and they showed a trend towards more label-based humour. Two-year-olds depended predominantly on object-based humour. Moreover, whereas the two-year-olds were just as likely to copy or riff off their parent's jokes as to make their own original attempts at humour, the three-year-olds most often came up with original jokes.
There was also good evidence that the toddlers were being deliberately humorous and not just making mistakes. When engaged in a funny behaviour versus an unfunny act, they were four times as likely to look and laugh at their parent, twice as likely to laugh without looking, and three times as likely to smile and look. "Children only increased smiling in combination with looks to parents, indicating parents should share their humour," the researchers said.
An online survey of 113 British parents (9 dads) about their children's humour largely supported the observational data. The children in this sample included infants and so an extended timeline of humour-production was possible. Before one year, infants mainly produced humour through peekaboo; from one year they graduated onto chasing and tickling and funny body movements; from two years they started object-based, conceptual and taboo-based jokes; and from age three they started label-based jokes.
The researchers said their results showed: "toddlers produce novel and imitated humour, cue their humour, and produce a variety of humour types."
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Hoicka, E., and Akhtar, N. (2012). Early humour production. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 30 (4), 586-603 DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-835X.2011.02075.x
--Further reading--
Little comedians.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
- Psychologists Have Devised A Test For Measuring One-year-olds' Creativity
The study found that creative parents tended to have creative toddlersA team of psychologists in England say they've developed a reliable way to measure divergent thinking in one-year-old infants. Divergent thinking is a form of creativity that involves...
- Toddlers Learn Better When You Make Them Giggle
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Toddlers as young as 19 months are able to distinguish jokes from mistakes - a skill that lays the groundwork for their later ability to recognise lies and false beliefs. That's according to Elena Hoicka and Merideth Gattis, who tested a large group...
- Tickle: Not Such A Laughing Matter
The similar way we react to a joke and to being tickled has led some, including Darwin, to suggest that our emotional experience of each is the same: that tickle is a 'physical joke'. Now for the first time, psychologists have studied people’s...
- Sex, Aggression, And Humour: Responses To Unicycling
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Neuroscience
The jokes that toddlers make
Coding of the videos revealed 7 forms of humour performed by the toddlers: using objects in an unconventional way (e.g. brushing a pot); deliberately mislabelling things (e.g. holding a cat but saying "here's a fish"); making deliberate category errors (e.g. making a pig go "moo"); breaching taboos (e.g. spitting and saying "that's disgusting"); performing funny bodily actions (e.g. falling back and putting their legs in the air); tickling and chasing; and playing peekaboo.
There were signs of maturing humour abilities. The three-year-olds more often made conceptual humour than the two-year-olds, and they showed a trend towards more label-based humour. Two-year-olds depended predominantly on object-based humour. Moreover, whereas the two-year-olds were just as likely to copy or riff off their parent's jokes as to make their own original attempts at humour, the three-year-olds most often came up with original jokes.
There was also good evidence that the toddlers were being deliberately humorous and not just making mistakes. When engaged in a funny behaviour versus an unfunny act, they were four times as likely to look and laugh at their parent, twice as likely to laugh without looking, and three times as likely to smile and look. "Children only increased smiling in combination with looks to parents, indicating parents should share their humour," the researchers said.
An online survey of 113 British parents (9 dads) about their children's humour largely supported the observational data. The children in this sample included infants and so an extended timeline of humour-production was possible. Before one year, infants mainly produced humour through peekaboo; from one year they graduated onto chasing and tickling and funny body movements; from two years they started object-based, conceptual and taboo-based jokes; and from age three they started label-based jokes.
The researchers said their results showed: "toddlers produce novel and imitated humour, cue their humour, and produce a variety of humour types."
_________________________________
Hoicka, E., and Akhtar, N. (2012). Early humour production. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 30 (4), 586-603 DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-835X.2011.02075.x
--Further reading--
Little comedians.
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
- Psychologists Have Devised A Test For Measuring One-year-olds' Creativity
The study found that creative parents tended to have creative toddlersA team of psychologists in England say they've developed a reliable way to measure divergent thinking in one-year-old infants. Divergent thinking is a form of creativity that involves...
- Toddlers Learn Better When You Make Them Giggle
There is probably nothing more fun than making a baby or toddler laugh. And now there's news that it could even help with learning – the toddler's not the adult's. In the first study to look at the effects of humour on learning at such a...
- Little Comedians
Toddlers as young as 19 months are able to distinguish jokes from mistakes - a skill that lays the groundwork for their later ability to recognise lies and false beliefs. That's according to Elena Hoicka and Merideth Gattis, who tested a large group...
- Tickle: Not Such A Laughing Matter
The similar way we react to a joke and to being tickled has led some, including Darwin, to suggest that our emotional experience of each is the same: that tickle is a 'physical joke'. Now for the first time, psychologists have studied people’s...
- Sex, Aggression, And Humour: Responses To Unicycling
Juggling unicyclist and UTSA graduate Ian Bexar Maurer-Stothert 'Tis the season for the British Medical Journal's satire issue to lighten the holiday mood. Last year's gems included 2007 Ig Nobel Prize winner, Sword Swallowing and Its...