CHAPTER VII. DEVELOPMENT OF LAUGHTER DURING THE FIRST THREE YEARS OF LIFE.
Having examined the earliest and distinctly hereditary germs of the laughing impulse in the child, we may pass to the consideration of its expansion and specialisation during the first years. Although, so far as I am aware, the new child-study has not yet produced a methodical record of the changes which this interesting expression of feeling undergoes, we may by help of such data as are accessible be able to trace out some of the main directions of its development.
Two closely connected problems are involved here: (a) how the expressive movements, the laugh and the smile, themselves change and get differentiated; and (b) how the psychical process which precedes and excites these expressive movements grows in complexity and differences itself into the various forms of gaiety or amusement enumerated above.
In dealing with these early manifestations we shall, of course, look for reactions which are spontaneous, in the sense of not being due to imitation and the lead of others. Yet it will not always be easy to determine what are such. It has been pointed out above that laughter is one of the most contagious of the expressive movements. Children, therefore, who are much given to imitation may be {187} expected to show this contagiousness in a particularly clear manner.
The difficulties are, however, not really so formidable as they might at first seem to be. If a child is, on the one hand, highly susceptible to the contagion of laughter, there is, on the other, no expression of his feeling in which he is more spontaneous. The swift directness of the “natural” or spontaneous laugh may be readily discriminated by a fine observer. Not only so, but a difference may be detected in the tone of the laughter when it is perfectly natural and real, and when it is merely imitative and artificial. The note of affected laughter is well known to careful observers of children. It is particularly plain where a child is not merely reproducing the laughter of others at the moment, but has it suggested to him by others that a thing is laughable. Miss Shinn’s niece developed at the end of the second year a forced laugh on hearing the word “funny” employed by others.
The best safeguard against this error is to choose an only child who is well isolated from mirthful surroundings. This need not be so cruel an experiment as it looks. In the social world of the merry little Ruth, nobody, we are told, was a “laughing person”. This circumstance gives great value to the observations made on this child. Her laughter was probably as purely self-initiated as anything in child-life can be.
It may be added that, even if we could not eliminate the imitative and the artificial element, there would still be a pretty wide field for careful observation in the child’s own freer type of mirth. For, as all his friends know, his hearty laughter is frequently a response to things which leave us dull “grown-ups” wholly unaffected, or affected in quite another way. {188}
With regard to the development of the expressive movements themselves I can find but few data at hand. These are enough, however, to show that the process of differentiation commences during the first year. Mrs. Moore tells us that her boy in the thirty-third week acquired a new form of smile “which gradually but not entirely supplanted the (earlier) broad open-mouthed smile. . . . The nose was wrinkled up, the eyes nearly closed. . . . This smile seemed to express an extreme and more conscious enjoyment.”[120] Preyer remarks that his boy developed in the last three months of the first year “a more conscious movement of laughter,” which, presumably, had a different character as an expressive movement. In the case of the boy C., of whom I have written elsewhere, a new and clearly differenced note was detected in the laugh of defiance (to be referred to later) which appeared early in the second year. Mrs. Hogan says she noticed a “mischievous laugh” at the age of fifty-five weeks, whereas Preyer remarks that the first “roguish laugh” occurred in his boy’s case at the end of the second year. A more precise record of the phonetic changes in laughter during the first two or three years is greatly to be desired.
The movements of laughter are subject to the laws of movement in general, Repetition and Habit. They tend to perfect themselves by practice; and the result probably involves a strengthening and an expansion of the wide-ranging organic commotion which makes up the reaction. A child of four will laugh on being tickled much more vigorously than one of two.[121] Moreover, the effect of repeated exercises of the function would seem, as already {189} hinted, to involve the setting up in the motor-centres, from which the discharge in laughter issues, a condition of high instability, so that a very slight application of the stimulus, or (as in the case of tickling) the mere threat to apply this, suffices to evoke the reaction. Lastly, this work of organisation will plainly involve a fixing of the connection in the brain-centres between the effect of the stimulation and the motor reaction. We say that the impulse of laughter has become associated with a definite kind of sense-presentation. The instant response of a child to the threatening fingers is a clear example of the result of such an associative co-ordination. Other examples are seen when a particular sight or sound takes on permanently a funny character. A child that has come to regard a figure in a picture book or an odd sound made by the nurse as funny will laugh whenever this recurs or is spoken of, provided that the mood of the moment is favourable. This is a noteworthy illustration of the way in which the action of the novel and unexpected—which, as we all allow, has a large rôle in the excitation of laughter—may be replaced by that of an antagonistic force, namely, habit, which itself appears to secure the hilarious response.