Children’s Laughter and Emotion Sharing With Peers and Adults in Preschool

This study investigated how laughter featured in the everyday lives of 3-5-year-old children in Swedish kindergartens. Typical laughter patterns and their functions were both studied and discussed, especially laughter in a kindergarten context between adults and children. The research questions were: (1) who laughs with whom, (2) how do adults respond to children’s laughter, and (3) what characterises the social situations in which laughter is used and reciprocated. The aim of the study was to deepen knowledge about emotional socialisation by showing how laughter functions in children’s everyday life and social situations, both among the children themselves and between the adults and the children in kindergarten.

The children laughed with other children, while the adults typically laughed with other adults. 87% of the children’s laughter was with other children, and adults laughed with other adults 2.7 times more often than with children. The qualitative analysis showed that children and adults exhibit different patterns of laughter. Children primarily sought and received affiliation through laughter in the peer group, and the adults were often focused on the institutional and pedagogical goals of the kindergarten. In general, the study found that intergenerational reciprocal laughter was a rare occurrence.

The data in this study is naturalistic and was collected from two Swedish kindergartens. The data consisted of 77 hours of video recording over a period of 1.5 years. ∼25 children and six adults from each of the two kindergartens participated in the study. The video material was encoded and 20 hours of recordings were qualitatively analysed.

Cekaite, A. & Andrén, M. (2019). «Children’s Laughter and Emotion Sharing With Peers and Adults in Preschool». Frontiers in Psychology 10:e852.