Playful teasing and the emergence of pretence

Abstract

The study of the emergence of pretend play in developmental psychology has generally been restricted to analyses of children’s play with toys and everyday objects. The widely accepted criteria for establishing pretence are the child’s manipulation of object identities, attributes or existence. In this paper we argue that there is another arena for pretending—playful pretend teasing—which arises earlier than pretend play with objects and is therefore potentially relevant for understanding the more general emergence of pretence. We present examples of playful pretend teasing in infancy before and around the end of the first year, involving pretend communicative gestures, mis-labelling and almost non-compliance with prohibitions. We argue that the roots of pretence not only lie earlier in human infancy than generally acknowledged, but also are rooted in playful emotional exchanges in which people recognise and respond to violations of communicative gestures and agreements.

Growing up laughing: Laughables and pragmatic functions between 12 and 36 months

“…In particular, Cameron et al (2006) stress how the first episodes of humour are interpersonally co-constructed and how humour production (together with the relative cues) can be considered as a sign of growth of internal representations and advances in interpersonal synchrony and resilience, as well as signaling the assimilation of social discourse rule and engagement with the cultural environment. We stress yet again how humour and laughter, in the context of clowning and teasing, can be highly informative about cognitive, emotional, social and pragmatic development (Reddy et al, 2022).…”

Intersubjective Roots of Pretend Play

“…However, in most cases researchers have focused on pretend play primarily as an activity involving verbal or quasi-verbal participants, resulting from specific cognitive and mentalistic accomplishments (Reddy, Williams & Costall 2022). Yet, defining pretend play as a cognitively-grounded end-product of the process of decoupling mental representations from realities has important consequences for how we investigate pretence, and the role of early play and interactions in drawing the pathway to the gradual development of more complex capacities, such as language.…”

“…implying that symbolic communication emerges out of earlier forms of meaningful understanding of the "aboutness" of dyadic interpersonal interactions with others, without having to depend on symbolic mediation.Which means: instead of looking for pretence in triadic interactions in which objects are used to represent other objects, one could focus on dyadic interactions in which the elements subject to transformation are people and their bodily and vocal expressions. This might support our understanding of how pretence develops in infancy and provide a continuity approach to how earlier forms might lead to later forms of pretence.Matheson 1992; Robinson 2019;Reddy et al 2022); and in most cases, this was narrowed down to focusing on single behaviours as precursors of later, more complex pretence-related and cognitive skills (such as: emotion regulation, joint attention, mind reading or role-reversal abilities;Fein 1981;Lillard, Pinkham & Smith 2011;Rakoczy 2008). However, in light of recent positions questioning causal claims about the unique importance of pretend play, engaged epistemological reflections on its roots and role in early development are needed(Lillard et al 2013).…”

Spontaneous playful teasing in four great ape species

“…While the playful teasing of human infants is certainly not as cognitively complex as adult forms of joking, it seems likely that the social and conceptual building blocks of joking (understanding others' expectations and deriving enjoyment from violating them) are already present in infants' teasing. Vasu Reddy and colleagues found that by 12 months, human infants produce three types of playful teasing behaviours [2,[6][7][8][9][10]. These are offer and withdrawal of objects (offering an object and quickly pulling it back), provocative non-compliance (attempting to perform a prohibited action or refusing to perform an expected behaviour) and disrupting others' activities (e.g.…”

“…For a teasing act to be interpreted as playful rather than aggressive, the recipient must be able to correctly identify the teaser's benign or playful intent [ 5 ], particularly when the actions used to tease are also used in aggressive contexts. The interpretation of actions during playful teasing (and play more broadly) as ‘not-serious’ may be one of the simplest and earliest forms of pretense [ 6 ].…”