Babies learn humour from parents
8 September Daily Telegraph
Children get their sense of humour from their parents as a study has
found babies as young as six months learn to laugh at the same thing as
their mothers and fathers.Researchers discovered that between the ages
of six months and one year, small children learn what is absurdly funny
by watching the reaction of their parents. A study of 30 children
carried out by Dr Gina Mireault of Johnson State College and Dr John
Sparrow at the University of New Hampshire, in America, involved
recording the reaction of babies watching normal and absurd events.
The project explored whether 6-month-olds look to their parents for
emotional guidance during absurd events, a phenomenon known as 'social
referencing'. It is known that eight month old babies look to their
parents to establish if a situation is threatening or to be feared but
it was not known if social referencing ocurred earlier or in other
situations.
Other research has found that 18-mon-old babies can make jokes with
other toddlers before they can talk by making gestures, noises and
shared play.
In the latest study, babies watched their parent react naturally to
two ordinary events, looking at a picture book and being shown a small
red foam ball. The events were then changed so that they became absurd:
The open picture book was bounced on the researcher’s head while she
said, “Zoop, Zoop” and the foam ball was placed on the researcher’s nose
while she poked it and said, “Beep, Beep” Parents were instructed to
either stare at the researcher with an expressionless face or to point
and laugh at her.
The study found that, although 6-month-old babies stared longer at
the absurd events, showing that these were unfamiliar to them, their
reactions to the events did not depend on their parents’ reactions.
However, babies watched their parents closely when they laughed. The
combination of paying close attention to absurd events and to others
laughing at those events might explain how babies develop the
sophisticated sense of humour they possess at 12 months, the researchers
said.
By their first birthdays, infants laughed at the absurd events, even
when their parents remained expressionless. Dr Mireault said: “Humour
might seem like a frivolous topic, but it provides a vehicle for
understanding infant development, in this case the development of social
referencing. "This study shows that 6-month-olds pay attention to
‘unsolicited emotional advice’ from parents during ambiguous situations
that might be funny.
"Our findings suggest that 6-month-olds are starting to see parents
as a source of emotional information, and this is likely to be an
important step on the way to being able to obtain emotional advice from
parents when this is needed, which we know infants do at 8 months. "By
12 months, infants seem to have had just enough life experience to make
up their own minds at least about what is absurdly funny.”
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