I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

Kids who had more types of humor in their repertoire that they understood, who liked a wider variety of jokes,

went on to better understand things like intentions, other people's goals six months later.

And so it might be that humor is giving you a great opportunity to understand other people.

Because if you're joking or someone else is joking, you have to understand their

emotions. You have to understand why were they putting a shoe on their head? Like, that's a really

weird thing to do. Do they know shoes go on your head? Have they, you know, have they made a mistake?

So there's a lot of things to think about. And it's a very positive environment to think about

that if we all have a laugh about it.

That's Elena Hoyke.

She's a professor of psychology at the University of Bristol in England.

Her research has the delightful goal of making babies giggle.

This is great because you work on two things that I just love, babies and laughing, and you got them together.

What got you into studying the laughter and sense of humor of babies?

So I started this over 20 years ago and I started my PhD.

And even at the end of my like undergrad degree, I just

wanted to write lots of papers about humor. I think I just worked with kids a lot. I taught them

swimming. I babysat. I worked in a in a daycare for like a few months. And so I decided to focus my

PhD on like how do kids come to understand what humor is?

There's, you know, it's something that happens every day of our lives, many times in our lives.

It starts, as I, we know now, really early.

But there's actually not that much research on it.

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