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Record W4410281135 · doi:10.1038/s44271-025-00252-3

Humorous peer play and social understanding in childhood

2025· article· en· W4410281135 on OpenAlexaff
Amy L. Paine, Salim Hashmi, Elian Fink, Peter Mitchell, Nina Howe

Bibliographic record

VenueCommunications Psychology · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicHumor Studies and Applications
Canadian institutionsConcordia University
FundersEconomic and Social Research Council
KeywordsPsychologyDevelopmental psychologyAttributionSocial competenceEarly childhoodSocial changeSocial psychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Humour plays a crucial role in children's early interactions, likely promoting the development of social understanding and fostering positive social relationships. To date, the connection between humour production in peer play and the development of social understanding skills in middle childhood has received limited attention. In a community sample of 130 children residing in the UK (M = 6.16 years old, range 5-7; 67 [51.5%] girls, 62 [47.7%] boys, and 1 [0.8%] non-binary child; 95 [73.1%] mothers and 85 [65.4%] fathers identified as Welsh, English, Scottish, or Irish), we tested our prediction that children's use of humour in play with peers would be positively associated with children's ability to understand the minds of others. We conducted detailed observational coding of children's humour production during peer play and examined associations with children's performance on a battery of social understanding assessments. Multilevel models showed that 42.8% of the variance in children's humour production was explained by play partner effects. When controlling for the effect of play partner and other individual child characteristics (age, gender, receptive vocabulary) children's spontaneous attributions of mental states were associated with humour production. Results are discussed considering how these playful exchanges reflect and influence the development of children's socio-cognitive competencies.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.007
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.008
Threshold uncertainty score0.015

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.007
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.002
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0000.002
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.127
GPT teacher head0.455
Teacher spread0.328 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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