Can infants laugh

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Addyman was reassured to have them confirm their children began to chuckle at three months. There is one game that babies all around the world find a laugh riot. Contenders for most hilarious game included such heavyweights as making silly noises or playing with puppets. The hands-down winner, even across different countries, was … peekaboo. Addyman was intrigued. A key ingredient that fuels early laughter: Sharing. This became clear in a lab study of laughter with preschoolers.

For the experiment, Addyman observed how children aged between 2-and-a-half years old and 4 years old reacted to a funny cartoon when they watched it alone, with one other child, and in a group. Children laughed eight times as much when they were with another child than when they watched the cartoon on their own — even though they reported that the cartoon was just as funny in both situations.

The need to communicate with laughter may have deep roots in our development as a species, speculates Addyman. While he is still teasing out why children needed to signal their enjoyment of the cartoon to whoever was there, he thinks it has to do with the idea, raised by Oxford University anthropologist and primatologist Robin Dunbar , that laughter could be a replacement for the earlier primate behavior of grooming.

Laughter is similarly difficult to fake. Seen this way, mutual merriment can serve as both social cue and social glue: Laughter makes you feel like you belong. It begins with parents making faces and funny noises to get the baby excited and interested, notes Doris Bergen, PhD, a professor of educational psychology at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. A baby's relationship to the adult doing the funny stuff matters as much as the physical sensations and funny noises; he'll laugh and play only if he feels secure.

After the first few chuckles, what makes an infant giggle is primarily physical and feels pleasurable: blowing raspberries on his belly, tickling his feet, picking him up and flying him gently through space. At about 4 months, a baby begins to laugh at things he can see and hear.

He'll delight in nonsense humor —an exaggeration of things he typically experiences, such as faces with wide-open mouths and big eyes and wacky sounds such as toots and trills.

Your baby's giggles mean he's having a good time, but he doesn't yet have a true sense of humor. He'll begin to develop one within the next six months, when he has the cognitive ability to find an idea funny. Try to tickle your newborn, and you'll discover that he doesn't laugh. Why isn't he ticklish? Maybe it's because he doesn't understand that other people are separate from him, says child development expert Lawrence Kutner, PhD, co-director of the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media.

If you've ever tried to tickle yourself, you know it doesn't work. However, he adds, we can't confirm this because "infants make lousy interview subjects. When Do Babies Laugh?