“Where’s your bum brain?” Humor, social understanding, and sibling relationship quality in early childhood

Abstract

Shared humor is a central feature of children's close relationships and a universal, integral part of human experience that is characterized by playful incongruity or, a benign conflict between what is expected and experienced

“A pirate goes nee-nor-nee-nor!” humor with siblings in middle childhood: A window to social understanding?

“…We also found that children who engaged in playful teasing with their sibling during dress-up play were more likely to have made reference to cognitive states while playing alone with the Playmobil set (e.g., “Kate [Playmobil figure] does not know where it is.”). This finding corroborates and extends previous work showing that children’s humor production is associated with their propensity to refer to cognitive states within sibling interactions (Paine et al, 2021). Although our findings suggest that humor production is associated with thinking about others’ minds, the cross-sectional nature of these associations preclude us from making any conclusions about causality.…”

“…We also investigated theoretically predicted associations between children’s humor production and their tendency to engage in pretense and their social understanding skills. As in previous studies (Paine, Howe, et al, 2019; Paine et al, 2021), most children produced humor with their sibling during play. Children most often performed incongruities, shared preposterous statements or humorous anecdotes, and engaged in playful teasing.…”

“…Given the close theoretical partnership between humor and pretend play (Bergen, 2019), we expected that children who play with objects in creative ways would also produce more humor. We also expected that humor production would be positively associated with social understanding skills, as indicated by children’s emotion understanding, tendency to talk about others’ cognitive states, and their understanding of second-order beliefs (Bergen, 2019; Dunn, 1988; Leekam, 1991; Martucci, 2016; Paine et al, 2021). Given that any significant associations with social understanding could be explained by known covariates (i.e., child age, language ability, working memory, family demographics; Cole & Mitchell, 2000; Lecce et al, 2017; Paine et al, 2018), we controlled for these covariates.…”

“…Siblings who share day-to-day family life are highly familiar with one another, which can result in emotionally intense and uninhibited interactions (Howe & Recchia, 2014). With siblings, children often engage in playful, mischievous behavior (Paine, Howe, et al, 2019; Paine et al, 2021), such as taboo-themed humor and playful teasing (e.g., “Where’s your bum brain?”), as well as word and sound manipulations (e.g., chanting, “Chocolatina, chocolatina!”) and incongruous actions (e.g., playfully putting their foot on the sibling’s head). Given that sibling interactions are a rich context for humor production, we have now investigated children’s spontaneous production of humor during dress-up play with a younger sibling.…”

“…Previous evidence suggests that humor shared with siblings is influenced by sibling constellation factors (i.e., birth order and gender composition). In early childhood, first-born children tend to produce more types of humor with their siblings—including playful banter and teasing and action and object incongruities—than do second-born children of the same age (Paine et al, 2021). In middle childhood, pairs of brothers produce more humor overall than pairs of sisters (Paine, Howe, et al, 2019).…”