婴儿为何发笑？翔
Babies can't possibly get a joke, so what causes their giggles? The answer might reveal a lot about the making of our minds, says Tom Stafford. 婴儿肯定是听不懂笑话的，那是什么让他们咯咯咯地笑呢？Tom Stafford说到，其中的原因说明了我们思想的构成方式。 What makes babies laugh? It sounds like one of the most fun questions a researcher could investigate, but there's a serious scientific reason why Caspar Addyman wants to find out. 婴儿为何发笑？这问题看似是个搞笑的研究课题，但是背后却涉及了一个严肃的科学命题，而Caspar Addyman决心一探究竟。 He’s not the first to ask this question. Darwin studied laughter in his infant son, and Freud formed a theory that our tendency to laugh originates in a sense of superiority. So we take pleasure at seeing another's suffering - slapstick style pratfalls and accidents being good examples - because it isn’t us. 而他并不是第一个问这个问题的人。之前达尔文就在他儿子婴儿的时候研究过这命题，而弗洛伊德认为我们笑是源于优越感。我们笑话别人的遭遇 – 滑稽地摔跤和意外遭遇正好说明这点 – 因为受苦的不是我们。 The great psychologist of human development, Jean Piaget, thought that babies’ laughter could be used to see into their minds. If you laugh, you must 'get the joke' to some degree - a good joke is balanced in between being completely unexpected and confusing and being predictable and boring. Studying when babies laugh might therefore be a great way of gaining insight into how they understand the world, he reasoned. But although he proposed this in the 1940s, this idea remains to be properly tested. Despite the fact that some very famous investigators have studied the topic, it has been neglected by modern psychology. 伟大的人类发展心理学家Jean Piaget认为，婴儿的笑是他们思维的体现。如果你笑，你肯定某种程度“懂了这个笑话” – 好的笑话是出人意料加稀里糊涂，加意料之中加穷极无聊的有机平衡。所以，Jean以为研究婴儿的笑，可能是了解他们认知世界方式的极好方法。虽然20世纪40年就有了这个理论，但是目前仍旧处于验证阶段。虽然有些许著名科学家研究过，但是此命题人就该被现代心理学所忽略。
If you want to make a baby laugh, then tickling is the surefire method 如果想逗孩子笑，挠痒痒是百试百灵的 Addyman, of Birkbeck, University of London, is out to change that. He believes we can use laughter to get at exactly how infants understand the world. He's completed the world's largest and most comprehensive survey of what makes babies laugh, presenting his initial results at the International Conference on Infant Studies, Berlin, last year. Via his website he surveyed more than 1000 parents from around the world, asking them questions about when, where and why their babies laugh. 伦敦大学伯贝克学院的Addyman决定改变这一现状。他相信通过笑，我们可以完全理解婴儿是如何认知世界的。因此，他就婴儿为何发笑，进行了世上最大范围最复杂的调查。去年柏林的婴儿研究国际论坛上，他就初步结果做了汇报。通过自建的网站，他调查了世界上超过1000个父母，询问他们孩子笑的时间，地点以及笑的原因。 The results are - like the research topic - heart-warming. A baby's first smile comes at about six weeks, their first laugh at about three and a half months (although some took three times as long to laugh, so don't worry if your baby hasn’t cracked its first cackle just yet). Peekaboo is a sure-fire favourite for making babies laugh (for a variety of reasons I've written about here), but tickling is the single most reported reason that babies laugh. 研究结果 – 一如课题本身一般 – 感人肺腑。婴儿第一次微笑大约在出生6周之后，笑出声的话，大概要出生三个半月（虽然有些要花近一年，但别担心，这迟早会来的）。躲猫猫是逗笑宝贝的绝佳办法，而挠痒痒却是家长们最常提及的逗笑方法。 Importantly, from the very first chuckle, the survey responses show that babies are laughing with other people, and at what they do. The mere physical sensation of something being ticklish isn’t enough. Nor is it enough to see something disappear or appear suddenly. It’s only funny when an adult makes these things happen for the baby. This shows that way before babies walk, or talk, they - and their laughter - are social. If you tickle a baby they apparently laugh because you are tickling them, not just because they are being tickled. 重要的事情，对于第一次咯咯咯笑，调查发现婴儿只有和他人在一起才会这么笑，而那些人的行为是婴儿笑出声的原因。仅仅肢体的触碰并不能逗他们笑出声，同样躲猫猫也不行。只有大人对着婴儿做某些事情的时候，他们才会笑出声。这表示在婴儿行走，说话之前，他们 – 其他他们的笑 – 已经有了社交意义。如果你挠一个宝宝的痒痒，他们咯咯咯地笑，是因为你在挠他们痒痒，而不是因为他们被挠了痒痒。
What's more, babies don't tend to laugh at people falling over. They are far more likely to laugh when they fall over, rather than someone else, or when other people are happy, rather than when they are sad or unpleasantly surprised. From these results, Freud's theory (which, in any case, was developed based on clinical interviews with adults, rather than any rigorous formal study of actual children) - looks dead wrong. 而且，孩子不会因为有人摔倒而笑。而相对于他人摔倒，或者别人不开心或者不愉快，婴儿更可能因为自己摔倒，或者别人开心而笑出声。根据这个结果，弗洛伊德的理论（玩去哪根据临床寻访成人，而非源自对婴儿开展的严谨研究）似乎完全错了。 Although parents report that boy babies laugh slightly more than girl babies, both genders find mummy and daddy equally funny. 虽然父母觉得男孩比女孩笑的更多，但男孩女孩觉得爸妈一样搞笑。 Babies find us funny - even if they're too young to understand why we're funny 婴儿觉得我们很搞笑 – 虽然他们还小得不知道什么叫做搞笑 Addyman continues to collect data, and hopes that as the results become clearer he'll be able to use his analysis to show how laughter tracks babies' developing understanding of the world - how surprise gives way to anticipation, for example, as their ability to remember objects comes online. Addyman仍在收集资料，而他希望随着结论的越来越明确，他有一天能够通过自己的分析发现如何通过笑来窥探婴儿对世界的理解 – 比如，当未来出人意料渐渐变成意料之中，那他们是如何记忆那些意料之中的物体的。 Despite the scientific potential, baby laughter is, as a research topic, “strangely neglected”, according to Addyman. Part of the reason is the difficulty of making babies laugh reliably in the lab, although he plans to tackle this in the next phase of the project. But partly the topic has been neglected, he says, because it isn't viewed as a subject for 'proper' science to look into. This is a prejudice Addyman hopes to overturn - for him, the study of laughter is certainly no joke. 按照Addyman的说法，婴儿发笑的科研价值一直被“莫名其妙的被无视”。部分原因是因为实验室内很难有效地保证婴儿会配合地笑，而他准备在实验下个阶段解决这个问题。而另一部分被无视的原因，他说到，是因为很多人不觉得这是一个“正统的”科学命题。这是Addyman希望推翻的一个偏见 – 对他而言，研究笑绝对不是为了开玩笑。 |
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