Billing, Addison Drew Niemeyer; (2023) Social behaviour in adults and infants: behavioural and optical imaging investigations. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The ability to respond appropriately to non-verbal cues is essential for communication, constituting an important aspect of social cognition. Laughter provides a fascinating window through which to study social cognition because it is culturally universal and not dependent on language. People automatically try to analyse the laughter they hear because it is always socially meaningful. Conversational laughter is not necessarily “fake laughter”, with the aim to deceive, but can signal different things in different contexts -since it is not associated with a particular emotion. Conversely, spontaneous laughter is related to feelings of emotional release or mirth. The first study in this thesis (Chapter 3) used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and behavioural methods to examine the neural basis of the behavioural contagion of laughter in the adult population. We demonstrate that the processing of laughter sounds recruits networks previously shown to be related to empathy and mentalising abilities. Furthermore, differences in the levels of cortical activation between laughter types could predict an individual’s perception of how contagious they found the laughter sound. The second part of this thesis outlines my contributions to demonstrate that an advanced fNIRS system, called high-density diffuse optical tomography (HD-DOT), could be applied successfully to study the infant population (Chapter 5). This data from this work was used to exemplify the importance of using robust statistical methods to analyse infant data (Chapter 6). The final study utilised HD-DOT, pupillometry, and behavioural questionnaires to examine infants’ abilities to process and produce laughter (Chapters 7 and 8, respectively). Analysis has revealed that the 6-8-month old infants can perceive the difference between laughter and non-communicative vocalisations at the cortical and pupil level. The functional activation associated with the perception of laughter in the right superior temporal gyrus is correlated with how often the baby laughs, as reported by parental report. Together these studies enrich our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the development of abilities for laughter processing and production throughout our lives.

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