Laughter, down to a science
|
|
Karissa McDonough and her 5-month-old daughter, Eireann, share a laugh in their Waterbury Center home. Photo by Stefan Hard |
Toolbox
By SARAH HINCKLEY
Staff Writer - Published: March 1, 2009
Karissa McDonough plunges her head into 5-month-old daughter Eireann's belly and kisses it, growls and lets out a guttural laugh.
Johnson State College student Caitlyn Dias holds a video camera on the pair in their Waterbury Center home, capturing the moment for future contemplation. Although Eireann smiles at her mother's antics, that's not quite what McDonough was hoping for.
"I'm not sure we're going to get her to laugh today," she says. "It really depends on how awake she is. ... She's really a happy, happy baby."
Finding out what makes Eireann - and 15 other participating babies - laugh is the focus of a study led by Johnson State College professor Gina Mirault. She has recruited three of her former students to help with the research and would ultimately like to have 20 babies in the study - just for giggles.
"The point is to see if we can catch the baby being amused," says Mirault, a developmental psychologist who has done a number of studies on child behaviors, including grief and tantrums. "There's no studies of contagious laughter in babies, and I want to do that."
So parents in central and northern Vermont are tickling tummies, making goofy faces and practicing their silly sound effects.
All this funny business has a serious purpose, though: Mirault hopes the findings can be used later in understanding emotional development in babies, specifically in those diagnosed with autism.
Babies in the study get a visit once a month between the ages of 3 and 6 months from one of Mirault's researchers, who videotape the tot (laughing, hopefully) to supplement records the parents have kept. There's a final visit at age 1 year.
Last month, the three students and Mirault were watching footage each had captured, trying to establish a coding system to document giggles and full belly laughs. The babies weren't the only ones laughing, though. Not only was the novice camera work a source of amusement for the researchers; the infants' faces and the parents' attempts to get a giggle were also good for a laugh. Perhaps there is something to be said about laughter being contagious.
"Humor varies pretty widely across cultures and even across families," says Mirault, whose inspiration for the study came from a humorous moment playing word games with her son when he was 3. "I'm thinking that parents are really giving the cues for humor." (Maybe that explains how that dry Vermont wit endures.)
Eireann is McDonough's second child, and she acknowledges being less anxious than with her first. In fact, she's kind of taken the study to heart, constantly looking for ways to elicit a giggle.
"I feel like I'm smiling all the time - my cheeks hurt. I feel like I'm living this study. ... It makes me more conscious of how I interact with her. I change her diaper and she thinks I'm tickling her the whole time."
McDonough is even doing her own kind of investigation of Eireann's different types of laughs and what causes them.
"One I think I heard was when she found her feet. It was kind of an 'ah-hah' laugh," says McDonough. "When she does something, I track it."
That parental dedication to recording incidents of laughter and humor is essential to the study, say Mirault and her students. Data collection is done through questionnaires, voice recordings and video - which, perhaps surprisingly, they consider a less objective medium.
"That's the thing about video data - you get this reactive component," Mirault says while sitting and watching footage of parents. "That's why we're not overly relying on the video data."
After each of the monthly check-ins, the student fills out a sheet noting details from the visit, which usually lasts a half-hour to an hour.
"It's really structured. There's all these parts to it," says Dias, the student from Winooski who has been working with McDonough and Eireann. "I didn't know you could study this stuff. I didn't know there were infant humor studies."
Mirault chose Dias and the two other students - Mallory Sargent-Hier of St. Albans and Merlin Poutre of Underhill - because she'd had them in classes and trusted they would be conscientious observers.
Their enthusiasm with the study is earning national recognition. Recently they learned they have been accepted into the Conference of Undergraduate Research "Posters on the Hill" exhibit in May in Washington, D.C. Only 60 projects from around the country, representing all scientific disciplines, were chosen for the event, in which students create a roughly 4-by-5-foot poster explaining their work and talk about it with members of Congress and others on Capitol Hill.
The Johnson State study is funded by Vermont Genetics Network (part of a National Institutes of Health initiative to facilitate biomedical research). It's expected to continue until all the data are collected and a hypothesis of sorts can be reached. But, as with any study, variables make for new discoveries, and what was meant to be a study strictly of moms and babies has broadened to include whatever interactions make a baby laugh - with Dad, the dog or big sis.
"That's really how research works. You have to be creative," says Mirault.
That includes using a shaking, grunting, giggling plastic pig as something of a control (or standard of comparison) in the research. At video recording sessions it has gotten a few reactions from the infants, but not the laugh the moms and researchers were hoping for. McDonough presented the pig to Eireann during Dias' visit and got more of a confused reaction than one of amusement.
Since there have been so few studies on child humor - especially in the United States - the group is blazing new territory.
Mirault explains the hypothesis of the study: "Humor is really related to development." Learning how it blossoms might shed light on conditions like autism in which emotional growth is stunted.
"Humor development may be used as a marker for certain emotional development and other development with age," she continues. "We've seen a real variety in infant temperament. ... Who else is looking at laughing babies?"
sarah.hinckley@timesargus.com
13