Laughing matters: Infant humor in the context of parental affect.

Smiling and laughing appear very early during the first year of life, but little is known about how infants come to appraise a stimulus as humorous. This short-term longitudinal study explored infant humor perception from 5 to 7 months of age as a function of parental affect during an absurd event. Using a within-participants design, parents alternated smiling/laughing with emotional neutrality while acting absurdly toward their infants. Group comparisons showed that infants (N = 37) at all ages smiled at the event regardless of parental affect but did so significantly longer at 5 and 6 months, and more often and sooner at 7 months, when parents provided humor cues. Similarly, sequential analyses revealed that after gazing at the event, 7-month-olds were more likely to smile at it only when parents provided humor cues and were comparatively more likely to look away when parents were neutral. Thus, starting at 5 months of age, parental affect influenced infants' affect toward an absurd event, an effect that was magnified at 7 months. These results are discussed in the context of emotional contagion, regulation, and the emergence of social referencing.

Social looking, social referencing and humor perception in 6- and-12-month-old infants.

Social referencing refers to infants' use of caregivers as emotional referents in ambiguous situations (Walden, 1993). Studies of social referencing typically require ambulation, thereby over-looking younger, non-ambulatory infants (i.e., ≤8-months) and resulting in a widespread assumption that young infants do not employ this strategy. Using a novel approach that does not require mobility, we found that when parents provided unsolicited affective cues during an ambiguous-absurd (i.e., humorous) event, 6-month-olds employ one component of social referencing, social looking Additionally, 6-month-olds who did not laugh at the event were significantly more likely to look toward parents than their counterparts who found the event funny. Sequential analyses revealed that, following a reference to a smiling parent, 6-month olds were more likely to smile at the parent, but by 12 months were more likely to smile at the event suggesting that older infants are influenced by parental affect in humorous situations. The developmental implications of these findings are discussed, as well as the usefulness of studying humor for understanding important developmental phenomena.