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This week we’re returning to an everyday psychology topic and pondering why we laugh. In classic Two Shrinks style, we talk through four pieces of research: preschoolers laughing with their friends, personality and laughter, ridicule in family and funeral workers’ use of laughter.

As always we finish up with things we came across: Amy freaks out about robot-human interaction and Hunter delights in a letter to the editor.

Research:

Social Facilitation of Laughter and Smiles in Preschool Children

Do extraverts ‘like to laugh’︁?: An analysis of the Situational Humor Response Questionnaire (SHRQ)

An Initial Study on How Families Deal with Ridicule and Being Laughed at: Parenting Styles and Parent–Child Relations with Respect to Gelotophobia, Gelotophilia, and Katagelasticism

I Nearly Died Laughing: Humor in Funeral Industry Operators

TWCA:

Robot Humor: How Self-irony and Schadenfreude Influence People's Rating of Robot Likability

Narratives with Robots: The Impact of Interaction Context and Individual Differences on Story Recall and Emotional Understanding

Development and Testing of Psychological Conflict Resolution Strategies for Assertive Robots to Resolve Human–Robot Goal Conflict

Designing Social Interactions with a Humorous Robot Photographer

Hunter’s book recommendation: In Moonland by Miles Allinson

Letter to the editor

73 - Why do we laugh? Dr Hunter Mulcare & Amy Donaldson Download