My path into infant humor research was circuitous, starting, of all places, with the loss of my mother when I was not quite 4 years old. Growing up without a mom raised my curiosity about mothers, mothering and motherlessness, and eventually led me to a doctorate in psychology, focusing on child development and early loss. These questions took on new depth when I became a mother myself and began exploring the long reach of early loss on maternal identity, as well as the intergenerational effects of that loss. Two things happened that changed the focus of my research from grief to humor. The first was finding that children of motherless women looked no different, psychologically, from other children. Their resilience was my relief. The second was my son’s first laugh, at 14 weeks, which happened at my father-in-law’s funeral. The contrast of his laughter among the mourners was striking, and the effect was remarkable. Nearby family members were instantly reoriented from grief to happiness. I certainly knew infants laughed, but the question occurred to me in that moment: Why? It was nearly a decade later that a sabbatical provided the opportunity for me to travel to Britain to study with Dr. Vasu Reddy, one of only three scholars at the time who was actively investigating infant humor development. One year later, four undergraduate students armed with camcorders were following parents around their homes, instructing them to do whatever they normally do to make their babies laugh or smile. That first naturalistic study was followed by many experiments over the next 20 years in which we showed infants “absurd” events (like poking a foam ball worn as a clown nose) under varying conditions to see what caused them to laugh. We found, as I write in an essay for Times Opinion this week, that laughter is one of the best indicators of a baby’s cognitive and social-emotional milestones. Perhaps the path from grief to humor has not been circuitous; rather, one led directly to the other.
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