The question seems ridiculous, but getting an answer is both difficult and important. A British scientist conducted a large-scale study of children’s laughter to get to the bottom of the truth. And he succeeded.
The nature of laughter has occupied psychologists for a long time. It is known that Darwin watched his laughing son, and Freud explained laughter with a sense of superiority: we, they say, laugh at a fallen person because we rejoice that he fell, and not me.
The great Swiss Jean Piaget, who devoted his whole life to the study of the child’s mind, believed that laughter is a window through which one can look at the world through the eyes of a child. He argued that any thing is funny only if, on the one hand, it is quite unexpected, and on the other, it still fits into our picture of the world.
So, every anecdote operates with elements familiar to us (Petka, Vasily Ivanovich, Vovochka – all the heroes of anecdotes are part of a common cultural code), but at the same time, at a strong point, it deceives our expectation. And if so, Piaget insisted, the child’s laughter tells us what he already knows about the world and what he doesn’t know yet.
However, a study that would confirm or disprove Piaget’s theory had to wait 70 years.
In 2015, Caspar Eddyman, a cognitive psychologist at Birkbeck College, University of London, created a website that interviewed more than 1000 parents. He was interested in only one question: “Why do your children laugh?”.
The results of the study are very touching: on average, babies smile for the first time at the age of six weeks, and laugh – when they are three months old. However, some begin to laugh six months later, so if the child does not yet laugh at the top of his lungs, there is no reason to panic. Most often, parents tickle children, but the surest way to make a baby laugh was the game “Where is mom (or dad)?”.
More importantly, young children do not tend to laugh at other people’s troubles.
They would rather laugh when they themselves fall than at a fallen adult. Moreover, babies laugh when they see smiling and joyful faces around them, and not sad and dull ones. So Freud’s theory (which he built on the basis of conversations with adults in his clinic) seems to be very far from the truth.
What else did Eddyman find out? That boys tend to laugh a little more than girls, but both laugh equally at adults of both sexes. In general, making sexist jokes with children will not work.
Why does the scientific world pay so little attention to the topic of children’s laughter? The scientist himself does not know this. Perhaps the fact is that it is very difficult to make a child laugh for scientific purposes. But something else is more important – children’s laughter has never been perceived by scientists as a subject worthy of study.
In the meantime, Caspar Eddyman continues to gather information and hopes to take the next step: to understand how laughter affects the development of children’s intelligence.