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The Play Research Centre

Our research

Our research investigates how different features of children’s play, such as humour and shared laughter, contribute to children’s understanding of minds, emotions, and behaviour.

Research highlights

Children’s Humour with Classmates is associated with their Developing Understanding of Minds

Although humour might seem simple, sharing a joke successfully with others requires complex cognitive and affective processes. Humour involves sharing an incongruity – something absurd or surprising – alongside playful cues, with the intention that the ‘audience’ will understand that the humorous act is meant to be funny. Sharing humour, therefore, may be associated with children’s developing understanding of the thoughts and emotions of others.

In our most recent study from the Cardiff HUmour Study (CHUMS), we investigated how five to seven-year-old children engage in humorous play with a peer in relation to their performance on social understanding tasks. Children played with a Playmobil zoo for 15 minutes with another child in their class, in a quiet space at school.

We found that the most important factor that explained children’s humour was humour shared by their play partner – showing that humour is a deeply social activity. Yet even when accounting for these effects, children’s performance on a mental state understanding task was associated with a greater tendency to engage in humorous play with a peer.

Read our published paper in Communications Psychology, which is open access to all:

See paper

Humour and Laughter with Siblings as a Window to Social Understanding

As two siblings play together, one child pulls a pirate hat off her brother’s head and throws it across the room. Laughing, her brother pretends to pour water into a teacup and ‘throws’ it at her. She runs to pick up the teapot, and shouts, “Pour! Pour-pour-pour-pour!” while pretending to pour the contents of the teapot on him. He falls to the ground dramatically and they both shriek and laugh.

Silly exchanges like these may come as no surprise to many parents. And for many people, some of the fondest memories of childhood are the times spent laughing and doing absurd and humorous things with close family and friends. But are serious things happening in all the silliness?

In our Cardiff Child Development Study (CCDS), we looked at seven-year-olds’ humorous play with siblings when they were given dressing-up toys to freely play with at home. The children also played with toys on their own and completed tasks designed to assess their social, emotional, and cognitive skills.

We found that some types of children’s humour, when they played with siblings, including sound play, such as talking in a very squeaky voice and playful teasing, such as light-hearted mischievous behaviour, was associated with children’s ability to understand the emotions and thoughts of other people.

We also found that children’s humour with siblings was associated with how they played pretend on their own, for example, making sound effects, animating toy figures, indicating that both humour and pretend play are ways children can be imaginative.

Read our Playful Childhoods blog post and our published paper in Developmental Psychology, which is open access to all:

See paper

Laughter in Early Parent-Child Play Protects against the Development of Anger and Aggression

Physically aggressive behaviours – like hitting or kicking out – can emerge during the very first years of life. As soon as infants have the motor skills to use force, some begin to show signs of physical aggression. However, children differ substantially in their levels of aggression at a given time, and they can show different patterns of behaviours over time: some may rarely show aggression, others may do so occasionally, and a small number show persistent or increasing levels over time.

In our study, we wanted to understand how patterns of early aggression unfold over time, not just on average, but for different groups of children who show different patterns of angry, aggressive behaviour in infancy. We also wanted to find out if positive parenting protects against the development of aggressive behaviour.

In the Cardiff Child Development Study (CCDS), we followed a large, representative community sample of children from infancy to middle childhood. Using person-centred statistical methods, we identified subgroups of infants who showed distinct developmental patterns of angry, aggressive behaviour across the first three years of life. Some children showed very low levels of anger and aggression, others showed high anger and moderate aggression, and a smaller group showed high anger and aggression.

Many children stayed in the same category over time from infancy to early childhood, but some changes did occur, with some children experiencing an escalation or de-escalation of angry aggressiveness over time.

We found that parents’ expressions of enjoyment, like smiling and laughing during free play, when playing with an activity board together, and during feeding, predicted a de-escalation of angry aggressiveness from infancy to childhood. Our findings are important for early prevention strategies by demonstrating that infants who show high levels of anger and aggressiveness very early in life can benefit from a warm caregiving environment.

Read our published paper in Development and Psychopathology, which is open access to all:

See paper