Humor in Infants

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. An Overview of Humor

   • Gina C. Mireault, Vasudevi Reddy

   Pages 1-9

3. The Development of Humor

   • Gina C. Mireault, Vasudevi Reddy

   Pages 11-22

4. Playfulness

   • Gina C. Mireault, Vasudevi Reddy

   Pages 23-30

5. Humor and Its Socio-Emotional Emergence

   • Gina C. Mireault, Vasudevi Reddy

   Pages 31-44

6. When Humor Goes Missing

   • Gina C. Mireault, Vasudevi Reddy

   Pages 45-53

7. Humor and Culture

   • Gina C. Mireault, Vasudevi Reddy

   Pages 55-59

8. Back Matter

   Pages 61-62

   PDF

This volume explores in depth how infants—perhaps as young as three months—develop the capacity to appreciate, participate in, and create humor. Engagingly written, it synthesizes theories of humor, its subtle complexities, and why it exists despite seeming to have little survival value. Chapters trace the developing skills in the child’s interactions with parents and others, the roles of verbal and nonverbal behaviors in humor, and related phenomena including absurdity, funniness, laughter, teasing, and play. These diverse perspectives offer rich insights into how the human mind learns from its environment, why humor is funny, and what humor can tell us about being human. 


This singular text: 

• Reviews theories and findings on humor and its critical role in social behavior.
• Analyzes the challenges of researching humor in infants and young children.
• Differentiates among concepts and contexts of humor and playfulness.
• Situates humor as a social-emotional as well as cognitive experience.
• Details current research on humor in atypically developing children.
• Examines the role of culture in humor.

Humor in Infants is an essential resource for researchers, clinicians, and graduate students in developmental psychology, infant mental health, social psychology, cognitive science, and pediatrics.

• Absurdity in infants
• Clowning in infants
• Humor in infants with atypical development
• Humor in typically developing infants
• Incongruity in infants
• Infant humor
• Infant laughter
• Infant mental health
• Playfulness in infants
• Smiling in infants
• Social referencing in infants
• Social-cognition of infants
• Social-emotional development of infants
• Teasing in infants

“Gina Mireault and Vasudevei Reddy, authors of Humor in Infants: Developmental and Psychological Perspectives, have written a short book totaling only 62 pages that examines numerous aspects of cognitive and emotional development in the first year of life as they might relate to the development of humor. … offers the interested reader a nice little summary of the thinking as well as the research on the topic of humor in infancy. It is a good jumping-off point for further study.” (Ronald J. Friedman, PsycCRITIQUES, Vol. 62 (1), January, 2017)

• Behavioral Sciences Department, Johnson State College, Johnson, USA

  Gina C. Mireault

• Dept of Psychology King Henry Bldg, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, United Kingdom

  Vasudevi Reddy

Gina Mireault, Ph.D., is a Developmental Psychologist and Professor in the Behavioral Sciences Department at Johnson State College. She studies the perception and creation of humor in infants from 3 months to 12 months of age, addressing the question: How do babies figure out what is funny?   She is interested in the serious implications of humor research for understanding critical developmental milestones, such as whether or not infants are capable of a “theory of mind”, whether or not humor can contribute to attachment security with parents, and whether or not infants rely on parental emotion to interpret and regulate their own emotional response to ambiguous events. She is intrigued by young infants’ detection of absurdity and what it may indicate about their early knowledge of social behavior.


Vasudevi Reddy, Ph.D., is Professor of Developmental and Cultural Psychology at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom. She is interested in the origins and development of social cognition, mainly in young infants. She has been exploring the role of emotional engagement in social understanding, focusing on such everyday, ordinary engagements as teasing and joking and showing-off or feeling shy, which often tend to be ignored in mainstream theories. She is Director of the Centre for Situated Action and Communication, which explores ideas of context and situation on different kinds of psychological phenomena. Her interest in engagement as the route to understanding has led her to questions about the nature and influence of cultural engagements on social understanding.

Policies and ethics