Babies' Laughing and Joking: When and Why with Gina Mireault, PhD
The Mind, Body and Soul in Healing
Release Date: 04/29/2022
The Mommy (and Daddy) Brain Controversies: Adaptation not Deficit with Bridget Callaghan, PhD (Los Angeles)
The Mind, Body and Soul in Healing
"We trained pregnant and never pregnant women and we tested them on their memory for these items immediately after they learned them and then we tested them two weeks later, looking at their long term autobiographical memory. What we found was that for the immediate test, the pregnant women did better than the never pregnant women on the baby relevant items, but they had equal performance on the adult oriented items. That gives some support to our hypothesis that when you actually test for benefits in cognition for ecologically relevant items you see them in pregnancy. But very surprisingly to...
info_outline
Two Psychiatrists Face the Illness of Their Daughter with Philip Lister, MD (New York)
The Mind, Body and Soul in Healing
"The universality of guilt - I think that my life as a child therapist has a lot of advantages; we carry the idea that ‘we are all the ages we've ever been’ and those magic years never disappear. There are some great things about that - there are some problems with it too. That kind of irrational self-centered construction to explain what is intolerable and difficult to grasp comes from that. Early in this whole process, I remember talking to the pediatrician taking care of us: ‘Was it something in the environment? Was it the street we lived on? Was it that we lived in the basement?...
info_outline
Stigma: How Support Groups for Mental Illness are Helpful with John Tamerin, MD
The Mind, Body and Soul in Healing
"Because I couldn't help my son, I couldn't do anything for him, I thought maybe I could start this group and help other people and other parents deal with this problem. What I wasn't prepared to face was just how lonely, how alone, how sad, and feeling hopeless I was. In a way, when the group began, I needed the group as much as the group needed me. I've continued the group although I need it for different reasons - at that point I needed it because I felt overwhelmed because of the problem with my son. Now I need it because I’ve grown to love the people of the group and I feel a...
info_outline
How Rituals Attach us to our Communities with Dimitris Xygalatas, Ph.D.
The Mind, Body and Soul in Healing
"If you randomly assign people in two groups and you give them different insignia or you have them go through different practices, as we saw in this study, they come to like each other more. It's very easy to create this basic sense of belonging and identity. Ritual is particularly good at eliciting that kind of sense also because it triggers our intuitions about what we call phenotypic matching, this is the idea that we have ways, psychological mechanisms, that allow us to recognize those that are members of our groups, especially kin, so if you think about it who are your kin, they're the...
info_outline
Might Rapamycin Extend our Lifespan, Healthspan, and Cognitive Functioning? with Arlan Richardson, PhD
The Mind, Body and Soul in Healing
"One of the things that is very exciting is that this is a very robust finding. In other words, sometimes in science people see something and then it's not replicated - Rapamycin’s impact on lifespan has been replicated. When I started researching this area 50 years ago, I never felt that we would find a pill that would have an impact on aging and lifespan. Aging is very complex - to find one thing that would have an impact was highly unlikely. So when this happened in 2009, I had a small part in this, it was really very exciting because for the first time we had something that could...
info_outline
An Analyst's Novel: Resilience in the Face of a Mother's Death with Kerry Malawista, PhD
The Mind, Body and Soul in Healing
"One way a child of Jody’s age deals with loss is that you don’t miss the person, in a sense you can become them. So, I have her step into the mother role, immediately trying to look after the younger ones and then wearing her mother sunglasses - it’s like she becomes her and then you don’t miss her so much. The neighbor is like an analyst figure, and she goes over and talks to this woman, Juliette, a very kind woman. I had Juliette say to her: ‘The way I see it, a death doesn’t happen just once, it’s like we have to keep being reminded that someone is gone - remember her - miss...
info_outline
Bipolar Disease, Insulin Resistance and Metformin: New Research with Cynthia Calkin, MD
The Mind, Body and Soul in Healing
"The best way to think about insulin resistance is that it’s pre-diabetes. In the course of developing type 2 diabetes, which we see in much higher rates in people with bipolar disorder compared to the general population, one starts off with normal blood sugar levels but elevated insulin. It is the elevated insulin that pushes the blood sugar down into the normal range. This is typically something that is missed by physicians because there’s been no medical indication to test for it [insulin level]. After the metabolic dysregulation progresses, patients become glucose intolerant, and at...
info_outline
The Value of Paternity Leave for Children and Families with Richard Petts, PhD
The Mind, Body and Soul in Healing
"When paternity leave comes into the picture you have a situation where parents are home together. Those processes are able to develop for both the mother and the father - there’s time for fathers to bond with their children, there’s time for parents to figure out how to be parents together. It’s not so lopsided where mothers become the experts because they are there all the time. Mothers and fathers can develop that expertise together because they are both there at home at the same time. At this sort of crucial point where you figure everything out for the first time, I think it...
info_outline
The Role of Technology in Mental Health Care with Isaac Galatzer-Levy, PhD
The Mind, Body and Soul in Healing
"There is a company called NightWare, that developed a feature for PTSD that uses components from Apple Watch. One of the primary symptoms in PTSD is intense nightmares which are very distressing, they disrupt their sleep and really drive a lot of symptomatology. This company created an app that detects when people with PTSD are having nightmares. It uses the existing sleep function [on the watch] to detect when they are having disruptive sleep. Then it uses the vibrating haptic to wake the patient up. So it is simply just disrupting their sleep, waking them up from a nightmare, and by...
info_outline
Disability, Psychotherapy, and Resilience with H. Penny Mishkin, MS, OTR
The Mind, Body and Soul in Healing
"I would say to any parent who has a child now or any adult who has a disability now - disabilities are looked at quite differently. They are accepted much more than they were when I was growing up. So, you can’t take things out of context, but I was just living a secret life and that wasn’t good, it really wasn’t. That was why I was remote, so what I would do is dissociate when I felt the pain of being so different and I really paid a price for that. I am not sure there was any way to get through it, I was a successful child by other standards, but emotionally I was very...
info_outline“That was actually Darwin's hypothesis in observing his own son and he writes about this in “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.” He writes about this incipient laughter – he was the first one to recognize this as a built-in response that the baby has that really pulls the baby into the adult world or pulls adults into the infant world. It is such an important emotional connection."
Episode Description: We begin with recognizing the profound pleasure of sharing in an infant's laughter. Gina walks us through the stages of involuntary smiling, which begins in utero, to voluntary laughing which begins at about 6 weeks of age. We discuss the influence of parents on whether a baby finds something funny. We also consider ‘incongruity’ and how it reveals the baby's 'theory of mind' - what the baby understands about how others' minds work. We come to appreciate teasing, which begins at around 6 months of age, and how it too reflects the baby's awareness of others' expectations. We also learn about the counterintuitive association between secure attachment and laughing. We close with Gina sharing with us her personal history that introduced her to the world of laughing infants.
Our Guest: Gina Mireault, Ph.D. is a Developmental Psychologist and Professor of Psychology at Northern Vermont University (USA). Her research focuses on humor development in the first year of life. She investigates how infants detect humorous events with implications for understanding critical developmental milestones like ‘theory of mind’, attachment security, and cognitive development. Dr. Mireault’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Vermont Biomedical Research Network. Her work has appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals including Human Development, Current Biology, and Infancy as well as in popular media outlets like The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, Science Daily, CNN.com, WebMD, American Baby, Parenting, and Salon. Her work has also appeared on NPR’s The Takeaway, PBS’ NOVA Science Now, NBC Nightly News, and CBC’s The Nature of Things.
Recommended Readings:
Mireault, G. (2022). The Social, Affective, and Cognitive Power of Humor in Infancy. In D. Dukes, E. Walle, & A. C. Sanson (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development, Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, UK. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.22
Mireault, G. C. & Reddy, V. (2016). Humor in Infancy: Developmental and Psychological Perspectives. New York: Springer.
Panksepp, J. (2000). The Riddle of Laughter: Neural and Psychoevolutionary Underpinnings of Joy. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9 (6),183-186.
Provine. R.R. (2012). Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond. Belknap/Harvard.
Provine, R.R. (2005). Laughing, Tickling, and the Evolution of Speech and Self. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13 (6), 215-218.
Scott, S. (2015, March). Why We laugh. [Video]. TED Conferences.