Examining the relationship between social cognition and humour in young children

Social cognition refers to understanding one’s own and others’ mental states and to perceive interpersonal knowledge between the self and the other. Humour refers to anything people perceive/produce with cognitive effort and consequently elicit smiling/laughter in the enjoyment of it. The purpose of this thesis is to examine whether social cognition and humour could be linked in young children when these constructs simultaneously emerge together from infancy through pre-school years using three comprehensive research designs. I first investigated longitudinal associations between social cognition and humour using parental surveys with a 6-month-interval in children from 1 to 47 months (Chapter 2). There was a positive relationship between social
cognition and humour controlling for age at baseline, and humour at time 1 predicted social cognition at time 2 whereas social cognition at time 1 did not predict humour at time 2. Second, I investigated whether this relationship holds in a laboratory setting using 11 social cognition tasks and a humour appreciation/production test in children from 3 to 47 months. Parents also completed the Early Social Cognition Inventory and the Early
Humour Survey out (Chapter 3). There was no relationship between social cognition and humour in children’s laboratory performances, but a positive relationship occurred in parental surveys. Finally, I investigated whether there is a causal relationship between social cognition and humour in 3-year-olds using a social cognition training study (Chapter 4). While the experimental group received a social cognition training based on the understanding of emotions and false beliefs, the control group received a Piagetian conservation training. However, social cognition training improved neither children’s humour skills nor their socio-cognitive skills. In sum, this thesis provides partial evidence for the relationship between social cognition and humour, and it suggests that it may occur in naturalistic environments with parental engagement rather than psychology laboratories.