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 Economics of Money, Banking, and Fin. Markets, 10e Global Edition
Chapter 10 Banking and the Management of Financial Institutions

10.1 The Bank Balance Sheet

1) Which of the following statements are true?

A) A bank's assets are its sources of funds.
B) A bank's liabilities are its uses of funds.
C) A bank's balance sheet shows that total assets equal total liabilities plus equity capital.
D) A bank's balance sheet indicates whether or not the bank is profitable.
Answer: C
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

2) Which of the following statements is false?

A) A bank's assets are its uses of funds.
B) A bank issues liabilities to acquire funds.
C) The bank's assets provide the bank with income.
D) Bank capital is recorded as an asset on the bank balance sheet.
Answer: D
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

3) Which of the following are reported as liabilities on a bank's balance sheet?

A) Reserves
B) Checkable deposits
C) Loans
D) Deposits with other banks
Answer: B
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

4) Which of the following are reported as liabilities on a bank's balance sheet?

A) Discount loans
B) Reserves
C) U.S. Treasury securities
D) Loans
Answer: A
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

1
Copyright © 2013 Pearson Education, Inc.
5) The share of checkable deposits in total bank liabilities has
A) expanded moderately over time.
B) expanded dramatically over time.
C) shrunk over time.
D) remained virtually unchanged since 1960.
Answer: C
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

6) Which of the following statements is false?

A) Checkable deposits are usually the lowest cost source of bank funds.
B) Checkable deposits are the primary source of bank funds.
C) Checkable deposits are payable on demand.
D) Checkable deposits include NOW accounts.
Answer: B
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

7) In recent years the interest paid on checkable and time deposits has accounted for around
________ of total bank operating expenses, while the costs involved in servicing accounts have
been approximately ________ of operating expenses.
A) 45 percent; 55 percent
B) 55 percent; 4 percent
C) 25 percent; 50 percent
D) 50 percent; 30 percent
Answer: C
Ques Status: Previous Edition

8) Which of the following statements are true?

A) Checkable deposits are payable on demand.
B) Checkable deposits do not include NOW accounts.
C) Checkable deposits are the primary source of bank funds.
D) Demand deposits are checkable deposits that pay interest.
Answer: A
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

9) Because checking accounts are ________ liquid for the depositor than passbook savings, they
earn ________ interest rates.
A) less; higher
B) less; lower
C) more; higher
D) more; lower
Answer: D
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

2
Copyright © 2013 Pearson Education, Inc.
10) Which of the following are transaction deposits?
A) Savings accounts
B) Small-denomination time deposits
C) Negotiable order of withdraw accounts
D) Certificates of deposit
Answer: C
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

11) Which of the following is not a nontransaction deposit?

A) Savings accounts
B) Small-denomination time deposits
C) Negotiable order of withdrawal accounts
D) Certificate of deposit
Answer: C
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

12) Large-denomination CDs are ________, so that like a bond they can be resold in a ________
market before they mature.
A) nonnegotiable; secondary
B) nonnegotiable; primary
C) negotiable; secondary
D) negotiable; primary
Answer: C
Ques Status: Previous Edition

13) Because ________ are less liquid for the depositor than ________, they earn higher interest
rates.
A) money market deposit accounts; time deposits
B) checkable deposits; passbook savings
C) passbook savings; checkable deposits
D) passbook savings; time deposits
Answer: C
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

14) Because ________ are less liquid for the depositor than ________, they earn higher interest
rates.
A) passbook savings; time deposits
B) money market deposit accounts; time deposits
C) money market deposit accounts; passbook savings
D) time deposits; passbook savings
Answer: D
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

3
Copyright © 2013 Pearson Education, Inc.
15) Banks acquire the funds that they use to purchase income-earning assets from such sources
as
A) cash items in the process of collection.
B) savings accounts.
C) reserves.
D) deposits at other banks.
Answer: B
Ques Status: Previous Edition

16) Bank loans from the Federal Reserve are called ________ and represent a ________ of
funds.
A) discount loans; use
B) discount loans; source
C) fed funds; use
D) fed funds; source
Answer: B
Ques Status: Previous Edition

17) Which of the following is not a source of borrowings for a bank?

A) Federal funds
B) Eurodollars
C) Transaction deposits
D) Discount loans
Answer: C
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

18) Bank capital is equal to ________ minus ________.

A) total assets; total liabilities
B) total liabilities; total assets
C) total assets; total reserves
D) total liabilities; total borrowings
Answer: A
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

19) Bank capital is listed on the ________ side of the bank's balance sheet because it represents a
________ of funds.
A) liability; use
B) liability; source
C) asset; use
D) asset; source
Answer: B
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

4
Copyright © 2013 Pearson Education, Inc.
20) Bank reserves include
A) deposits at the Fed and short-term treasury securities.
B) vault cash and short-term Treasury securities.
C) vault cash and deposits at the Fed.
D) deposits at other banks and deposits at the Fed.
Answer: C
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

21) The amount of checkable deposits that banks are required by regulation to hold are the
A) excess reserves.
B) required reserves.
C) vault cash.
D) total reserves.
Answer: B
Ques Status: Revised
AACSB: Analytic skills

22) Which of the following are reported as assets on a bank's balance sheet?
A) Borrowings
B) Reserves
C) Savings deposits
D) Bank capital
Answer: B
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

23) Which of the following are not reported as assets on a bank's balance sheet?
A) Cash items in the process of collection
B) Deposits with other banks
C) U.S. Treasury securities
D) Checkable deposits
Answer: D
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

24) Through correspondent banking, large banks provide services to small banks, including
A) loan guarantees.
B) foreign exchange transactions.
C) issuing stock.
D) debt reduction.
Answer: B
Ques Status: Previous Edition

5
Copyright © 2013 Pearson Education, Inc.
25) The largest percentage of banks' holdings of securities consist of
A) Treasury and government agency securities.
B) tax-exempt municipal securities.
C) state and local government securities.
D) corporate securities.
Answer: A
Ques Status: Previous Edition

26) Which of the following bank assets is the most liquid?

A) Consumer loans
B) Reserves
C) Cash items in process of collection
D) U.S. government securities
Answer: B
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

27) Secondary reserves include

A) deposits at Federal Reserve Banks.
B) deposits at other large banks.
C) short-term Treasury securities.
D) state and local government securities.
Answer: C
Ques Status: Previous Edition

28) Because of their ________ liquidity, ________ U.S. government securities are called
secondary reserves.
A) low; short-term
B) low; long-term
C) high; short-term
D) high; long-term
Answer: C
Ques Status: Previous Edition

29) Secondary reserves are so called because

A) they can be converted into cash with low transactions costs.
B) they are not easily converted into cash, and are, therefore, of secondary importance to banking
firms.
C) 50% of these assets count toward meeting required reserves.
D) they rank second to bank vault cash in importance of bank holdings.
Answer: A
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

6
Copyright © 2013 Pearson Education, Inc.
30) Banks' asset portfolios include state and local government securities because
A) they help to attract business from these government entities.
B) banks consider them helpful in attracting accounts of Federal employees.
C) the Federal Reserve requires member banks to buy securities from state and local
governments located within their respective Federal Reserve districts.
D) there is no default-risk with state and local government securities.
Answer: A
Ques Status: Revised
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

31) Bank's make their profits primarily by issuing

A) equity.
B) negotiable CDs.
C) loans.
D) NOW accounts.
Answer: C
Ques Status: Previous Edition

32) The most important category of assets on a bank's balance sheet is

A) discount loans.
B) securities.
C) loans.
D) cash items in the process of collection.
Answer: C
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

33) Which of the following are bank assets?

A) the building owned by the bank
B) a discount loan
C) a negotiable CD
D) a customer's checking account
Answer: A
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

34) Banks may borrow from or lend to another bank in the Federal Funds market. A loan of
excess reserves from one bank to another bank is recorded as a(n) ________ for the borrowing
bank and a(n) ________ for the lending bank.
A) asset; asset
B) asset; liability
C) liability; liability
D) liability; asset
Answer: D
Ques Status: New
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

7
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10.2 Basic Banking

1) Banks earn profits by selling ________ with attractive combinations of liquidity, risk, and
return, and using the proceeds to buy ________ with a different set of characteristics.
A) loans; deposits
B) securities; deposits
C) liabilities; assets
D) assets; liabilities
Answer: C
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

2) In general, banks make profits by selling ________ liabilities and buying ________ assets.
A) long-term; shorter-term
B) short-term; longer-term
C) illiquid; liquid
D) risky; risk-free
Answer: B
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

3) Asset transformation can be described as

A) borrowing long and lending short.
B) borrowing short and lending long.
C) borrowing and lending only for the short term.
D) borrowing and lending for the long term.
Answer: B
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

4) When a new depositor opens a checking account at the First National Bank, the bank's assets
________ and its liabilities ________.
A) increase; increase
B) increase; decrease
C) decrease; increase
D) decrease; decrease
Answer: A
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

8
Copyright © 2013 Pearson Education, Inc.
5) When Jane Brown writes a $100 check to her nephew and he cashes the check, Ms. Brown's
bank ________ assets of $100 and ________ liabilities of $100.
A) gains; gains
B) gains; loses
C) loses; gains
D) loses; loses
Answer: D
Ques Status: Revised
AACSB: Analytic skills

6) When you deposit a $50 bill in the Security Pacific National Bank,
A) its liabilities decrease by $50.
B) its assets increase by $50.
C) its reserves decrease by $50.
D) its cash items in the process of collection increase by $50.
Answer: B
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

7) When you deposit $50 in currency at Old National Bank,

A) its assets increase by less than $50 because of reserve requirements.
B) its reserves increase by less than $50 because of reserve requirements.
C) its liabilities increase by $50.
D) its liabilities decrease by $50.
Answer: C
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

8) Holding all else constant, when a bank receives the funds for a deposited check,
A) cash items in the process of collection fall by the amount of the check.
B) bank assets increase by the amount of the check.
C) bank liabilities decrease by the amount of the check.
D) bank reserves increase by the amount of required reserves.
Answer: A
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

9) When a $10 check written on the First National Bank of Chicago is deposited in an account at
Citibank, then
A) the liabilities of the First National Bank increase by $10.
B) the reserves of the First National Bank increase by $ 10.
C) the liabilities of Citibank increase by $10.
D) the assets of Citibank fall by $10.
Answer: C
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

9
Copyright © 2013 Pearson Education, Inc.
10) When a $10 check written on the First National Bank of Chicago is deposited in an account
at Citibank, then
A) the liabilities of the First National Bank decrease by $10.
B) the reserves of the First National Bank increase by $10.
C) the liabilities of Citibank decrease by $10.
D) the assets of Citibank decrease by $10.
Answer: A
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

11) When you deposit $50 in your account at First National Bank and a $100 check you have
written on this account is cashed at Chemical Bank, then
A) the assets of First National rise by $50.
B) the assets of Chemical Bank rise by $50.
C) the reserves at First National fall by $50.
D) the liabilities at Chemical Bank rise by $50.
Answer: C
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

12) When $1 million is deposited at a bank, the required reserve ratio is 20 percent, and the bank
chooses not to hold any excess reserves but makes loans instead, then, in the bank's final balance
sheet,
A) the assets at the bank increase by $800,000.
B) the liabilities of the bank increase by $1,000,000.
C) the liabilities of the bank increase by $800,000.
D) reserves increase by $160,000.
Answer: B
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

13) When $1 million is deposited at a bank, the required reserve ratio is 20 percent, and the bank
chooses not to make any loans but to hold excess reserves instead, then, in the bank's final
balance sheet,
A) the assets at the bank increase by $1 million.
B) the liabilities of the bank decrease by $1 million.
C) reserves increase by $200,000.
D) liabilities increase by $200,000.
Answer: A
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

10
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14) With a 10% reserve requirement ratio, a $100 deposit into New Bank means that the
maximum amount New Bank could lend is
A) $90.
B) $100.
C) $10.
D) $110.
Answer: A
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

15) A deposit outflow results in equal reductions in

A) loans and reserves.
B) assets and liabilities.
C) reserves and capital.
D) assets and capital.
Answer: B
Ques Status: New
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

16) Using T-accounts show what happens to reserves at Security National Bank if one
individual deposits $1000 in cash into her checking account and another individual withdraws
$750 in cash from her checking account.
Answer: Security National Bank
Assets Liabilities
Reserves +$250 Checkable deposits +$250
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

10.3 General Principles of Bank Management

1) Which of the following are primary concerns of the bank manager?

A) Maintaining sufficient reserves to minimize the cost to the bank of deposit outflows
B) Extending loans to borrowers who will pay low interest rates, but who are poor credit risks
C) Acquiring funds at a relatively high cost, so that profitable lending opportunities can be
realized
D) Maintaining high levels of capital and thus maximizing the returns to the owners.
Answer: A
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

11
Copyright © 2013 Pearson Education, Inc.
2) If a bank has $100,000 of checkable deposits, a required reserve ratio of 20 percent, and it
holds $40,000 in reserves, then the maximum deposit outflow it can sustain without altering its
balance sheet is
A) $30,000.
B) $25,000.
C) $20,000.
D) $10,000.
Answer: B
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

3) If a bank has $200,000 of checkable deposits, a required reserve ratio of 20 percent, and it
holds $80,000 in reserves, then the maximum deposit outflow it can sustain without altering its
balance sheet is
A) $50,000.
B) $40,000.
C) $30,000.
D) $25,000.
Answer: A
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

4) If a bank has $10 million of checkable deposits, a required reserve ratio of 10 percent, and it
holds $2 million in reserves, then it will not have enough reserves to support a deposit outflow of
A) $1.2 million.
B) $1.1 million.
C) $1 million.
D) $900,000.
Answer: A
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

5) If a bank has excess reserves greater than the amount of a deposit outflow, the outflow will
result in equal reductions in
A) deposits and reserves.
B) deposits and loans.
C) capital and reserves.
D) capital and loans.
Answer: A
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AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

12
Copyright © 2013 Pearson Education, Inc.
6) A $5 million deposit outflow from a bank has the immediate effect of
A) reducing deposits and reserves by $5 million.
B) reducing deposits and loans by $5 million.
C) reducing deposits and securities by $5 million.
D) reducing deposits and capital by $5 million.
Answer: A
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Analytic skills

7) Bankers' concerns regarding the optimal mix of excess reserves, secondary reserves,
borrowings from the Fed, and borrowings from other banks to deal with deposit outflows is an
example of
A) liability management.
B) liquidity management.
C) managing interest rate risk.
D) managing credit risk.
Answer: B
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

8) If, after a deposit outflow, a bank needs an additional $3 million to meet its reserve
requirements, the bank can
A) reduce deposits by $3 million.
B) increase loans by $3 million.
C) sell $3 million of securities.
D) repay its discount loans from the Fed.
Answer: C
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

9) A bank with insufficient reserves can increase its reserves by

A) lending federal funds.
B) calling in loans.
C) buying short-term Treasury securities.
D) buying municipal bonds.
Answer: B
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

10) Of the following, which would be the first choice for a bank facing a reserve deficiency?
A) Call in loans
B) Borrow from the Fed
C) Sell securities
D) Borrow from other banks
Answer: D
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills
13
Copyright © 2013 Pearson Education, Inc.
11) In general, banks would prefer to acquire funds quickly by ________ rather than ________.
A) reducing loans; selling securities
B) reducing loans; borrowing from the Fed
C) borrowing from the Fed; reducing loans
D) "calling in" loans; selling securities
Answer: C
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

12) ________ may antagonize customers and thus can be a very costly way of acquiring funds to
meet an unexpected deposit outflow.
A) Selling securities
B) Selling loans
C) Calling in loans
D) Selling negotiable CDs
Answer: C
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

13) Banks hold excess and secondary reserves to

A) reduce the interest-rate risk problem.
B) provide for deposit outflows.
C) satisfy margin requirements.
D) achieve higher earnings than they can with loans.
Answer: B
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

14) If a bank needs to acquire funds quickly to meet an unexpected deposit outflow, the bank
could
A) borrow from another bank in the federal funds market.
B) buy U.S. Treasury bills.
C) increase loans.
D) buy corporate bonds.
Answer: A
Ques Status: New
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

14
Copyright © 2013 Pearson Education, Inc.
15) Which of the following statements most accurately describes the task of bank asset
management?
A) Banks seek the highest returns possible subject to minimizing risk and making adequate
provisions for liquidity.
B) Banks seek to have the highest liquidity possible subject to earning a positive rate of return on
their operations.
C) Banks seek to prevent bank failure at all cost; since a failed bank earns no profit, liquidity
needs supersede the desire for profits.
D) Banks seek to acquire funds in the least costly way.
Answer: A
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

16) The goals of bank asset management include

A) maximizing risk.
B) minimizing liquidity.
C) lending at high interest rates regardless of risk.
D) purchasing securities with high returns and low risk.
Answer: D
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

17) Banks that suffered significant losses in the 1980s made the mistake of
A) holding too many liquid assets.
B) minimizing default risk.
C) failing to diversify their loan portfolio.
D) holding only safe securities.
Answer: C
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

18) A bank will want to hold more excess reserves (everything else equal) when
A) it expects to have deposit inflows in the near future.
B) brokerage commissions on selling bonds increase.
C) the cost of selling loans falls.
D) the discount rate decreases.
Answer: B
Ques Status: Previous Edition
AACSB: Reflective thinking skills

15
Copyright © 2013 Pearson Education, Inc.
Other documents randomly have
different content
love of fun, which is at the bottom of tickling and makes it perhaps
the earliest clear instance of mirthful play with its element of make-
believe, first emerged gradually out of a more general feeling of
gladness.
 CHAPTER VII.
DEVELOPMENT OF LAUGHTER DURING THE FIRST THREE
YEARS OF LIFE.

Having examined the earliest and distinctly hereditary germs of the

laughing impulse in the child, we may pass to the consideration of
its expansion and specialisation during the first years. Although, so
far as I am aware, the new child-study has not yet produced a
methodical record of the changes which this interesting expression
of feeling undergoes, we may by help of such data as are accessible
be able to trace out some of the main directions of its development.
Two closely connected problems are involved here: (a ) how the
expressive movements, the laugh and the smile, themselves change
and get differentiated; and (b ) how the psychical process which
precedes and excites these expressive movements grows in
complexity and differences itself into the various forms of gaiety or
amusement enumerated above.
In dealing with these early manifestations we shall, of course,
look for reactions which are spontaneous, in the sense of not being
due to imitation and the lead of others. Yet it will not always be easy
to determine what are such. It has been pointed out above that
laughter is one of the most contagious of the expressive
movements. Children, therefore, who are much given to imitation
may be {187} expected to show this contagiousness in a particularly
clear manner.
The difficulties are, however, not really so formidable as they
might at first seem to be. If a child is, on the one hand, highly
susceptible to the contagion of laughter, there is, on the other, no
expression of his feeling in which he is more spontaneous. The swift
directness of the “natural” or spontaneous laugh may be readily
discriminated by a fine observer. Not only so, but a difference may
be detected in the tone of the laughter when it is perfectly natural
and real, and when it is merely imitative and artificial. The note of
affected laughter is well known to careful observers of children. It is
particularly plain where a child is not merely reproducing the
laughter of others at the moment, but has it suggested to him by
others that a thing is laughable. Miss Shinn’s niece developed at the
end of the second year a forced laugh on hearing the word “funny”
employed by others.
The best safeguard against this error is to choose an only child
who is well isolated from mirthful surroundings. This need not be so
cruel an experiment as it looks. In the social world of the merry little
Ruth, nobody, we are told, was a “laughing person”. This
circumstance gives great value to the observations made on this
child. Her laughter was probably as purely self-initiated as anything
in child-life can be.
It may be added that, even if we could not eliminate the imitative
and the artificial element, there would still be a pretty wide field for
careful observation in the child’s own freer type of mirth. For, as all
his friends know, his hearty laughter is frequently a response to
things which leave us dull “grown-ups” wholly unaffected, or
affected in quite another way. {188}
With regard to the development of the expressive movements
themselves I can find but few data at hand. These are enough,
however, to show that the process of differentiation commences
during the first year. Mrs. Moore tells us that her boy in the thirty-
third week acquired a new form of smile “which gradually but not
entirely supplanted the (earlier) broad open-mouthed smile. . . . The
nose was wrinkled up, the eyes nearly closed. . . . This smile seemed
to express an extreme and more conscious enjoyment.”120 Preyer
remarks that his boy developed in the last three months of the first
year “a more conscious movement of laughter,” which, presumably,
had a different character as an expressive movement. In the case of
the boy C., of whom I have written elsewhere, a new and clearly
differenced note was detected in the laugh of defiance (to be
referred to later) which appeared early in the second year. Mrs.
Hogan says she noticed a “mischievous laugh” at the age of fifty-five
weeks, whereas Preyer remarks that the first “roguish laugh”
occurred in his boy’s case at the end of the second year. A more
precise record of the phonetic changes in laughter during the first
two or three years is greatly to be desired.
The movements of laughter are subject to the laws of movement
in general, Repetition and Habit. They tend to perfect themselves by
practice; and the result probably involves a strengthening and an
expansion of the wide-ranging organic commotion which makes up
the reaction. A child of four will laugh on being tickled much more
vigorously than one of two.121 Moreover, the effect of repeated
exercises of the function would seem, as already {189} hinted, to
involve the setting up in the motor-centres, from which the
discharge in laughter issues, a condition of high instability, so that a
very slight application of the stimulus, or (as in the case of tickling)
the mere threat to apply this, suffices to evoke the reaction. Lastly,
this work of organisation will plainly involve a fixing of the
connection in the brain-centres between the effect of the stimulation
and the motor reaction. We say that the impulse of laughter has
become associated with a definite kind of sense-presentation. The
instant response of a child to the threatening fingers is a clear
example of the result of such an associative co-ordination. Other
examples are seen when a particular sight or sound takes on
permanently a funny character. A child that has come to regard a
figure in a picture book or an odd sound made by the nurse as funny
will laugh whenever this recurs or is spoken of, provided that the
mood of the moment is favourable. This is a noteworthy illustration
of the way in which the action of the novel and unexpected—which,
as we all allow, has a large rôle in the excitation of laughter—may
be replaced by that of an antagonistic force, namely, habit, which
itself appears to secure the hilarious response.
It may be added that so far as Habit comes in, reducing the
importance of the initial psychical stage, and rendering the reaction
automatic, the theory of Lange and James applies fairly well. The
feeling of genial hilarity is in this case largely the reflex mental effect
of the movements themselves, including the whole organic
commotion brought about.
Coming now to the development of the psychical element in
laughter, we may, by way of introduction, refer to certain principles
which ought to be useful.
(a ) To begin with, any variety of emotional reaction {190} excited
by a particular kind of presentation appears, as it is repeated, to
undergo a process of development, taking on more of fulness and
complexity. A feeling of attachment to a person or to a place, or of
admiration for a cherished work of art, grows fuller and deeper with
the establishment of a relation of intimacy. Dimly realised
resonances of former like experiences melt into, and deepen the
feeling, and new elements are woven into it by associative
complication, and by growing reflection. This increasing complexity
affects both the ideational basis of the emotion and the closely
connected emotional tone itself.122
At first sight we might be disposed to think that the feeling of
sudden joy at the back of a merry explosion would prove to be an
exception to this law. Since an element of novelty, a sense of joyous
mental collapse under a sudden, yet harmless stimulus, runs through
all our laughter, there might seem to be no room for any increase of
depth and volume. But this is not so. A child’s feeling of the “fun of
it” at the approach of the tickling hand seems to gain in volume and
force with the repetition of the experience. The zest of the
enjoyment of a laughing romp with the nurse, or, better, with the
father, of watching the funny ways of a kitten, and so forth, grows
fuller because of the increasing complication of the psychosis behind
the laughter.123
(b ) In the second place the development of an emotion is
essentially a differentiation of it, not merely into a more definite kind
of experience as a whole, but into a number of {191} distinguishable
sub-varieties of feeling. In other words, the reaction is called forth
by new excitants and new modes of stimulation which give rise to
mental complexes somewhat different from those caused by the
earlier excitants. Thus, as we mentally develop, admirations having a
richer ideational structure and more complexity of feeling-tone take
the place of the first simple ones, which last die out or survive only
as rudimentary processes.
 This enlargement of the field of exciting objects, with the
concomitant differencing of the emotional state into a larger and
larger number of shades, is the outcome of the whole process of
mental growth. It means, first of all, the growing differentiation of
the child’s experience, that is, of his perceptions and ideas, as well
as the expansion of his reflective processes. In this way a modified
admiration attaches itself to a new kind of object, e.g., works of art,
virtuous actions, when these come to be perceived and reflected on
in such a way as to disclose their admirable side.
In all such extensions the emotional reaction remains in its
essential elements one and the same experience. We may say, if we
like, that the expression has been “transferred” to a new situation or
a new experience, through the working of a force which has been
called “the analogy of feeling”.124
This process of extension by analogy of situation and attitude
may be seen to be a constituent in the development of laughter.
Taking its primitive form to be the expression of a sudden raising of
the feeling-tone of consciousness to the level of gladness—which
elevation may be supposed to {192} involve at least an appreciable
sense of relief from a foregoing state of strain or oppressive dulness
—we may readily see how the reaction is passed on, so to speak, to
analogous mental attitudes which are developed later.
Let us take as an example a child who, having reached a dim
apprehension of the customary behaviour of things begins to laugh
at certain odd deviations from this. Here the transition appears
clearly to be a kind of transference mediated by the identity of the
mental attitude with that of the laughter of an earlier stage, say at
the sight of the new and entertaining baubles. Similarly when, after
the consciousness of rule is developed, a child roguishly “tries it on”
by pretending to disobey, we may regard the new outburst of the
spirit of fun as a natural transition from an earlier variety, the
laughing pretence of running away from mother or nurse.
Nevertheless, we have to do here with more than a mere
transference. Such extensions always involve some amount of
complication and enrichment of the mirthful experience. These later
forms of mental gaiety depend on the development of more complex
psychoses, both on the intellectual and on the emotional side. The
first amusement at the sight of the ill-matched, the inconsequent,
implies the advance of an analytic reflection up to the point of a dim
perception of relations. A large part of the extension of the field of
the laughable depends on this intellectual advance, a finer and more
precise apprehension of what is presented, in its parts and so as a
whole, as also in its relations to other things. With respect to the
other condition, expansion of the emotional life, it is enough to
remark that certain forms of laughter which fall within the first years
of life arise directly out of a deepening of the emotional
consciousness as a whole, e.g., the awakening of the “self-feeling,”
as seen {193} in the laughter of success or triumph; or, on the other
hand, of tenderness and sympathy, as illustrated in the first
rudiments of a kindly humour.
We see, then, that, as a feature in development, differentiation
into a multiplicity of forms is inseparably connected with another
feature, complication. The gradual appearance of a number of
laughters variously toned, such as that of slightly malicious elation at
collapse of dignity, of entertainment at an intellectual
inconsequence, and of a kindly amusement at a petty disaster,
means that the elemental feeling of joy is getting modified by
accretions or absorptions of new psychical elements.
A final remark is needed to prevent misapprehension. Among the
several processes of complication which underlie this differentiation
of the laughing psychosis, some tend to arrest or tone down the
reaction. It is thus that, when sympathy comes to be united with the
laughing impulse, the gaiety of the latter is apt to become subdued
into something between a smile and the gentlest of laughs. In
addition to this inhibitory effect of heterogeneous emotional
elements we have that of new conative attitudes. A child soon finds
out that a good deal of his rollicking laughter is an offence, and the
work of taming the too wild spirits begins.125
With these general considerations to help us, we may now look
at the course of development of the laughing experience during the
first three years.
It may be premised that the smile and the laugh only become
gradually differentiated as signs of qualitatively dissimilar attitudes.
In the case of Ruth the two expressions remained for a time
interchangeable, and frequently {194} alternated in the same fit of
joyous delight. But about the 129th day the smile, it is remarked,
began to take on one of its specialised functions, the social one of
greeting.
Coming now to laughter, we have found that it begins at an early
date to pass from a general sign of sudden increase of pleasure or
good spirits into something akin to mirthful play. This has been
illustrated in the early responses to tickling, and, a little later, to
simple forms of a laughing game (e.g., bo-peep).
 By what process of change, one may ask, does the impulse to
laugh when the heart suddenly grows glad pass into the laughter of
play? Allowing, as seems certain, that the play-impulse is inherited,
can we point out any psychological connection between the two?
The answer has already been given in substance in our general
analysis of the causes of laughter. A sudden rise of pleasurable
consciousness, when it possesses the mind and becomes gladness,
say the infant’s flood of delight at the swinging coloured baubles,
necessarily dissolves, for the time, the tense, serious attitude into a
loose, play-like one. The child’s consciousness is now all gladness in
face of his bauble; and play is just another way of effecting this
dissolution of the serious attitude into a large gladness. Not only so,
but the elemental mood of laughter resembles the play-mood, since
it finds its satisfaction in pretence or make-believe. The gladdening
object divested of all serious interest becomes a play-thing, a mere
semblance of the thing of practical account which the child observed
in the serious moments. Its greeting by the senses may be
described, indeed, as a kind of play of these senses. Hence, the
specialisation of the primal laughter of delight into that of fun would
appear to be one of the simplest processes in the whole
development of the emotion. {195}
We may now briefly trace out some of the phases of
development of these two primal forms of laughter.
With regard to the laughter of delight and jollity, we find, to
judge from the careful record of Ruth’s emotional utterances, that
there is a rapid development during and after the fourth month.126 In
this month, we read, the child was thrown into a state of vivacious
delight—which expressed itself in smiles, in movements, in cooing
and crowing—by the faces and voices which may be said to have
“played” to her as she sat at table. The advent of the meal was that
of a new joyous world, and, if the child could have spoken, she
would probably have exclaimed, “Oh, what fun!” The large change
effected by the return of a familiar face and voice after an absence
was only another way of transforming her world into a merry one.
Towards the end of the fifth month, the note-book speaks over
and over again of “jollity” and “high spirits,” of the child’s “laughing
with glee when any one smiled or spoke to her,” of “being
exceedingly jolly, smiling, kicking and sputtering,” and so forth. This
growing gleefulness seemed to be the outcome of new expansions
of the pleasurable consciousness, of a pure “Lebenslust”. No doubt it
had its obscure source in a pleasurable cœnaesthesis, the result of
merrily working digestive and other processes of organic life. Yet it
had its higher conditions, also, in the expansion of the life of the
senses and in the growing range of the muscular activities. Laughter
and shouts of joy would, we are told, accompany not merely the
inrush of delightful sights and sounds, but the new use of bodily
powers in exploring and experimenting. {196}
This gaiety in taking possession of her new world showed itself in
the greeting of friendly faces. The new appearance of her
grandfather after an absence excited her laughter on the 133rd day.
By about the middle of the year, the child had, like Preyer’s boy,
developed a jubilant greeting for her social belongings, nodding a
friendly nod with all the signs of huge delight.
These outbursts of laughing joy may sometimes be seen to have
been preceded by a distinctly disagreeable state of feeling. In the
case of Ruth, we are told that the fit of jollity broke out, on one or
two occasions, upon “instantaneous relief from great general
discomfort”. Again, on the 222nd day, having awoke and felt timid,
she laughed with joy and a sense of relief when her mother came
into the room. I have other evidence to show that this laughter of
overflowing gladness is often to some extent a relief from constraint.
Thus, a boy of one and a half years who had a new nurse, and for
some days behaved with great gravity when with her, was during the
same period “extremely hilarious” when alone with his parents.
The gladness of the world grew larger to this happy girl when,
towards the end of the seventh month, she was taken into the open
air, and, shortly after, allowed to lie on a quilt and roll on the ground.
The wooing of the passing freshness, the play of sun and shadow,
the large stir of life in moving and sounding things, all this possessed
her and made her “laugh and ejaculate with pleasure”. With this may
be compared a note on a boy nine months old, who, lying in a
clothes-basket in a garden one summer’s day, looked up at the
leaves dancing in the sunshine and laughed with “a hearty noisy
laugh”.
The development of bodily power in this same half-year brought
our little maiden much gleeful laughter. {197} Any experience of
movement, passive as well as active, filled her with noisy hilarity. To
ride on anybody’s foot brought out, at the end of the fifth month,
the unmistakable signs of hilarious rapture. A month later, the
gleeful explosion was called out by the new frolicsome experience of
being jumped and tossed. Similar expressions of mirth occurred
when new active movements were accomplished. In the record of
the middle of the ninth month, we are told of a medley of
movements, tumbling on the floor or lawn, sitting up and lying
down, raising herself on the feet and hands, etc., which brought her
“singular joy”.
A part of the gleefulness of this widening experience of
movement is due to its unexpected results. It seems probable that
the first successful experiments in crawling, climbing and the rest
may give rise to new complexes of muscular and other sensations
which come as a joyful surprise. Such delightful surprises grow more
varied and impressive when the arms and hands begin to
experiment. For example, a little girl, aged two and a quarter years,
happened when throwing a ball at random to jerk it over her head,
and was seized with a spasm of hilarity. The gleeful outburst is apt
to occur, too, later on when a child first achieves the feat—half-
wonderful, half-amusing—of walking, of running and of jumping.127
In these expanding processes of jollity or gleefulness we may
detect the beginnings of more specialised forms of laughing
enjoyment. Thus, in the outburst of merriment which winds up a
successful attempt to climb, we recognise the germ of that mode of
reaction which is apt to follow at the moment of sudden relaxation
of tension on the attainment of an end. We may be sure that a child
{198}of nine months finds the effort to stand a very serious and
exhausting strain; and may infer that the laughter which occurs in
this case is largely due to momentary relaxations of this strain.
But again, these experiences clearly supply conditions favourable
to the emergence of that “sudden glory” which enters into successful
effort. The “shouting and laughing” of little Ruth (forty-five weeks)
on completing the magnificent exploit of climbing the staircase had,
as her aunt’s epithet “exultant” recognises, something of the free-
breathing jubilation of the successful mountain-climber. We are told
further that, in the tenth month, Ruth would break into the same
exultant laugh after some successful mental effort, such as pointing
out the right picture when this was asked for.
Here, then, we have the laughter of a joyous feeling-tone
complicated by new elements. These include, not merely the
delightful feeling of relief after prolonged effort, but some dim form
of an agreeable consciousness of growing power and of an
expanding self. In the glee on mastering a new movement, e.g.,
riding on somebody’s foot, we see traces of a more distinctly playful
mood. We may now follow out the development of this large variety
of gamesome mirth.
The overflow of the health-filled reservoirs of muscular activity
begins at an early stage to wear an unmistakable aspect of
playfulness. The first exercises in crawling, accompanied by various
sounds of contentment and gladness, are indeed recognisable by all
as a kind of play. As the forces of the organism establish themselves
a more manifest bent to a romping kind of game appears. This, as a
game in which co-operation enters, involves a development of the
social consciousness, and its gleefulness comes {199} in part from the
reverberations of mutual sympathy. A good example of the hilarity of
a romping game is Ruth’s uproarious delight, in the seventh month,
when dragged about on a carpet, an experience which involved, of
course, much loss of equilibrium and some amount of awkward
bumping. That the bumps were of the essence of the enjoyment is
confirmed by the fact that, in the tenth month, she would like to
stand, holding on to a chair, and then deliberately to let herself go so
as to “come down sitting with a thud,” winding up the performance
by “looking up laughing and triumphant”. Another game involving
exciting jolts was liked in the middle of the twelfth month. The child
was shot in her carriage, now from the aunt to the mother, and now
back, each little ride ending up with a jolt, over which she grew very
merry. Later on, (at the end of the twentieth month) she laughed
heartily on being knocked down by her dog in a too pushful bit of
play; and she enjoyed in like manner some pretty rough play at the
hands of a nine-year-old boy companion.
This mirthful treatment of romps, which must have involved a
palpable amount of discomfort, is interesting as showing how
laughter plays about the confines of the serious. This little girl
seems, up to the age of three, at least, to have been curiously
indifferent to pain. Yet she was not wanting in the common childish
timidity. It looks, then, as if the fun of these rather rough games
turned on dissolutions of nascent attitudes of apprehension, and,
consequently, the laughter expressed something of a joyous
contempt of fear. Indeed, it seems likely that an element of this
joyous rebound from a half-developed state of fear entered into
much of this child’s laughter, already illustrated, on succeeding in a
rather risky experiment, such as climbing the staircase. We read
that, like other vigorous {200} children, she was a keen pursuer of
new experiences, even in cases in which she knew that some pain
was involved. The passion for trying new experiments seems to have
urged her on, in spite of nascent fear; and the final shouting and
laughing may well have announced, along with the joy of successful
effort, a sense of triumph over the weaker timid self. The ability,
illustrated in these hardy experiments, to turn situations suggestive
of danger into “larkish” play, was a singular proof of the firm
foundation on which this child’s prevalent mode of gaiety reposed.
 In some cases Ruth’s play would take on a form which clearly
involved a triumphing over fear. Thus, we are told that when, on the
429th day, she was asked to find “auntie” in the dark she at first
stood still and silent. Then, when her head was touched by
somebody’s hands, she broke into laughter and started off by herself
to explore in the dark. Later on, with the growth of a bolder spirit,
this laughing triumph over fear extended itself, so that in the twenty-
ninth month she played at bear with her uncle, going into a dark
room, with her hand in her aunt’s, and enjoying “the exhilaration of
unreal alarm”; and when the uncle sprang out from his dark hiding-
place, growling fearfully, she “laughed, shrieked and fled all in one”.
If the uncle went a little too far in the use of the alarming she would
check him by saying, “Don’t do that again”.
In these cases, it is evident, we have a complex psychosis with
alternating phases. The awful delight which vents itself at once in a
laugh and in a shriek and a flight is certainly of a mixed feeling-tone.
The laughter is the note of a triumphant spirit, and yet of one in
which, in the moment of triumph, the nascent fear leaves its trace.
In these laughing games we have clearly an element of {201}
make-believe. A firm persuasion, low down in consciousness, of the
harmlessness of the coming bump and of the human bear in the
blackness keeps the little girl’s heart steady and turns the adventure
into fun. At the same time, the play as “pretending” would seem to
involve at least a half-formed expectation of something, and
probably, too, a final taste of delicious surprise at the fully realised
nothingness of the half-expected. In some forms of play-pretence
this element of final annihilation of expectation becomes more
conspicuous and the distinct source of the hilarious exultation.
When, for example, in the eleventh month, Ruth sitting on the floor
held out her arms to be taken up, and the mother, instead of doing
this, stooped and kissed the child, there was a perfect peal of
laughter again and again.
The increase of muscular activity shown in the laughing romps
leads to the extension of mirthful enjoyment in another way. A
vigorous child, even when a girl, grows aggressive and attempts
various forms of playful attack. As we have seen, to tickle another is
merely one variety of a large class of teasing operations, in which
the teased as well as the teasing party is supposed to find his
merriment. Regarding now the child as teaser, we see that he very
early begins to exercise at once his own powers and others’
endurance. The pulling of whiskers is one of the earliest forms of
practical jokes. Ruth took to this pastime in the first week of the fifth
month. By the end of the sixth month the little tormentor had grown
aware of her power, and “became most eager to pull, with laughter
and exultant clamour, at the nose, ear, and especially the hair, of any
one that held her”. The boy C., at the same age, delighted in pulling
his sister’s hair, and was moved by her cries only to outbursts of
laughter. As intelligence develops, these practical jokes grow more
cunning. Another little {202} girl, of whom I have written elsewhere
under the initial M., when seventeen months old, asked for her
father’s “tick-tick,” looking very saucy; and as he stooped to give it,
she tugged at his moustache, “and almost choked with laughter”.
With this teasing of human companions we have that of animals.
When sixteen months old, Ruth would chase the cat with shouts of
laughter. Another child, a boy, about the same age, went
considerably further, and taking the toilet puff from its proper place
went deliberately to “Moses,” the cat, who was sitting unsuspectingly
before the fire, and proceeded to powder him, each new application
of the puff being accompanied by a short chuckle.
There is no need of reading into this laughter the note of cruel
exultation over suffering.128 Ruth’s mischievous doings would take
forms which had not even the semblance of cruelty. There was
merely impish playfulness in the act of snatching off her
grandmother’s spectacles and even her cap, with full accompaniment
of laughter, in the twenty-second month when lifted to say good-
night. In much the same spirit the other little girl, M., delighted,
when two years old, in untying the maid’s apron strings and in other
jocose forms of mischief.
The laughing mood in these cases is understandable as a rioting
in newly realised powers, a growing exultation as the consciousness
of ability to produce striking effects grows clearer. Ruth, in her
eleventh month, blew a whistle violently and looked round laughing
to her aunt and the others present. Here, surely, the laughter was
that of {203} rejoicing in a new power. This sense of power implies a
clearer form of “self-feeling”. A child may grow keenly conscious of
the self in such moments of newly tried powers, as he grows in “the
moments of intense pain”. This laughter, then, furnishes a good
illustration of the sudden glory on which Hobbes lays emphasis.
I have assumed that in this laughing mischief we have to do with
a form of (playful) teasing. The little assailant enjoys the fun of the
attack and counts on your enjoying it also. The indulgence of others,
even if they do not show an equal readiness for the pastime,
removes all thought of disobedience, of lawlessness.
 Yet things do not commonly remain at this point of perfectly
innocent fun. The gathering energies of the child, encouraged by
indulgence in games of romp, are pretty certain to develop distinctly
rowdyish proceedings. Ruth, for example, when about twenty-one
months old, scrambled defiantly on to the table at the close of a
meal, seized on the salts, and scampered about laughing. About the
same time this new spirit of rowdyism showed itself in flinging a
plate across the room and other mutinous acts. Little boys, I
suspect, are much given to experiments in a violent kind of fun
which they know to be disorderly. One of them, aged two years
eight and a half months, was fond of “trying it on” by pulling hair-
pins out of his mother’s hair, splashing in the puddles in the road,
and so forth, to her great perplexity and his plainly pronounced
enjoyment.
In these outbursts of laughing rowdyism we see more than an
escape of pent-up energies, more than a mere overflow of “high
spirits”; they are complicated by a new factor, something of the
defiant temper of the rebel. A child of two has had some experience
of real disobedience, and may be said to have developed simple
ideas of order {204} and law. We may reasonably infer, then, that in
this turbulent fun there is some consciousness of setting law at
defiance. The presence of this new psychical factor is seen in the
alteration of the laughing sounds themselves. In Ruth’s case, we are
told, they were “rough” and unlike the natural and joyous utterance.
It is further seen in the method of the fun, for, as Miss Shinn
observes, Ruth “tried repeatedly to see how far she could go safely
in roguish naughtiness”.
 I think we find in this behaviour a clear instance of laughter
becoming an ingredient in the attitude of throwing off a customary
restraint. It is the early analogue of the laughter of the rowdies bent
on window-smashing, of the riotous enjoyment of the people at
festal seasons when the lord of misrule holds sway.
The degree of conscious defiance of order may, no doubt, vary
greatly. In much of what we view as the disorderly mirth of a child
this ingredient of the laughing mood may be small and sub-
conscious; yet at times it grows distinct and prominent. Thus, Ruth,
in the eleventh month, developed a special expression for the
attitude of defiance when disobeying, namely, a comical face with a
wrinkling of the nose, together with laughter. The boy C., early in the
third year, would give out a laugh of a short mocking ring on
receiving a prohibition, e.g., not to slap his dog companion. He
would remain silent and laugh in a half-contemptuous way.
Sometimes in his moods of defiance he would go so far as to strike a
member of his family and then laugh. His laugh was sometimes
highly suggestive of the mood of derision.
In this note of warlike challenge we have a point of kinship with
the “crowing” laughter of the victor. Yet it is doubtful whether a child
at this early age reaches the {205} mental attitude of a mocking
contempt. Preyer tells us that he has never observed scornful
laughter within the first four years.129
When the consciousness of the unruly in these “high jinks”
becomes distinct and begins to be oppressive, the laughter will be
less boisterous and express more of playful pretence. The child
learns to be satisfied with making a feint to rebel, with a make-
believe unruliness. Ruth, on the 236th day, laughed when pretending
to disobey by biting off the petals of flowers, and on the 455th day,
by stuffing buttons into her mouth. The boy C., when about the
same age, had his little way of turning disobedience into a game. In
the seventeenth month, when he was bidden by his mother to give
up a picture he had got possession of, he walked up to her and
made a show of handing over his unlawful possession, and then
drew his hands back with much laughing enjoyment.
A more complicated psychical attitude appears when such
laughing pretence at disobedience takes on a “roguish” aspect. Here
we have, not only an element of slight uneasiness, but one of self-
consciousness, which together give a distinct complexion to the
whole mental attitude and to its expression.
This ingredient of a timid self-consciousness or shyness under
the scrutiny of others appears, as we know, some time after the
simpler forms of fear. In Ruth’s case it seems to have showed itself
on the 123rd day in a distinctly “roguish” attitude. When at dinner
and spoken to by her grandfather, she turned her head as far as she
could. On the 141st day, too, when held in her nurse’s arms, she {206}
smiled at her grandfather and others and then ducked her head.
This expression of roguish self-consciousness had more of the look
of a nervous explosion in the eleventh month, when the girl laughed
on being set on her feet in a corner where she was much noticed;
and again, in the thirteenth month, as she tumbled about and
showed herself off. This laughter, with something of the gêne of
self-consciousness in it, was, we are told, not to be confounded with
the expression of a complacent self-consciousness.
The element of an awkward shyness comes into much of the
early playful “trying it on”. In the case of the boy C., just mentioned,
it was seen in the sly, upward look of the eyes and the short, half-
nervous laugh, when he was face to face with authority and
disposed to play at disobedience. The fuller roguish laugh occurs
frequently along with a risky bit of play, as when a boy of one and a
half year would point to himself when asked for a finger-recognition
of somebody else. In such cases the laughter seems like an attempt
to get rid of the element of risk. When the masking of the impulse of
fun by timidity is greater, the expression reaching only to a tentative
smile, the roguishness of a child may easily wear a look of kinship
with our grown-up humour.130
A full account of the development of laughter during these first
years, as an ingredient of the play-mood, would be of great value. It
would, in particular, help us to see how the reaction comes to be
definitely co-ordinated with the sense of make-believe, and the
attitude of throwing off the burdensome restrictions of reality. The
vocal mirth of children, as they give reins to their fancy, attests to
{207} the weight of this burden and to the intense delight which

comes from its momentary abandonment.

In seeking for the first traces of the laughter of play and of
defiance, we are not greatly troubled by the interfering influence of
others. No doubt this influence is at work even here. The nurse and
the parents are pretty certain to laugh at much of the roguish “trying
it on”; and this laughter will react upon the child’s own merriment.
In play, too, in which others usually take some part, there is this
action of older persons’ laughter. Still, in the main, the utterances
are spontaneous, and at most are reinforced by way of some
sympathetic rapport with another.
 It is otherwise when we come to consider the first instances of
laughing amusement at the presentation of “funny” objects. The
lead of others now complicates the phenomenon to a much more
serious extent. The recognition of an object as “funny” implies some
detection of a quality which acts on others as well as on the self;131
consequently, it presupposes a certain development of the social
consciousness. Hence, some cautiousness is needed in noting the
first clear examples of a perception of the quality. Before language
comes and supplies a means of self-interpretation, we cannot safely
say that because a child laughs in presence of an object there is a
recognition of something objectively “funny”. As we have seen, such
laughter may be fully accounted for by supposing that the object has
an exhilarating or gladdening effect on the child’s feeling. On the
other hand, when language is added we have to cope with the
difficulty, already touched on, that a child’s pronouncements are apt
to be controlled by what others laugh at and call funny.
Nevertheless, here, too, the child’s spontaneity and his way of
discovering his own {208} sources of amusement may enable us to
overcome the difficulties.
Our study of the conditions of the perception suggests that a true
enjoyment of presentations as oddities is not to be expected at a
very early date. And this, first of all, for the reason that the new,
especially if it is strange, even though fitted to draw forth a joyous
laugh, may easily excite other and inhibitory attitudes. An infant,
during the first year of life, if not later also, is apt to be disturbed
and apparently alarmed at the approach of new objects, so as to be
unaffected by its rejoicing aspect; or, if he feels this, the laughter
may be accompanied by signs of fear. Ruth, on her 254th day,
greeted a kitten which her father brought to show her with “all
gradations from laughter and joy to fear”. In the second place—and
this is of more importance—the recognition of an object as funny
presupposes the work of experience in organising a rudimentary
feeling for what is customary. This, again, involves a development of
the social consciousness and of an idea of a common order of
things.
Now all this requires a certain amount of time. It hardly seems
reasonable to look for a true apprehension of the laughable till some
time after the appearance of an imitation of others’ laughter and
play-gestures, which was first observed, in the case of the boy C., in
the ninth month. Nor could it well be expected until after a child had
acquired some understanding of others’ language, so as to note how
they agree in naming and describing certain objects as funny, which
understanding only begins to be reached in the second half of the
year. Hence, I should hesitate to speak of a clear recognition of a
laughable object as such before the last quarter of the year. It seems
to me, for example, a little rash to say that a boy of five months,
who always laughed inordinately when a very jolly-looking physician,
the image of Santa Claus, paid him a visit, displayed a “sense of
{209}

humour”.132
When once the idea of objects of common laughter begins to
grow clear a child is, of course, able to develop perceptions of the
funny along his own lines. This he certainly seems to do pretty
briskly. The freshness of his world, the absence of the dulling effect
of custom which is seen in the perceptions of older folk, renders him
an excellent pioneer in the largely unknown territory of King
Laughter.
 Among the sense-presentations which awaken the infantile laugh
are new and queer sounds of various sorts; and they may well be
selected for a study of the transitions from mere joyous exclamation
to a hilarious greeting of what is “funny”. Early in the second half of
the first year, a child in good health will begin to surmount the
alarms of the ear, and to turn what is new and strange into fun.
About the 222nd day brave little Ruth was able to laugh, not only at
such an odd sound as that produced when her aunt rattled a tin cup
on her teeth, but at that of a piano. Preyer’s boy, later in the year,
was given to laughing at various new and out-of-the-way sounds,
such as that of the piano, of gurgling or clearing the throat, and
even of thunder.
Odd sounding articulations appear to be especially provocative of
laughter about this time. As early as the 149th day, Ruth laughed at
new sounds invented by the aunt, such as “Pah! Pah!” Queer
guttural sounds seem to have a specially tickling effect.
After words and their commoner forms have begun to grow
familiar, new and odd-sounding words, especially names, are apt to
be greeted with laughter. The child M., when one year nine months
old, was much impressed by the {210} exclamation “good gracious!”
made by her mother on discovering that the water was coming
through the ceiling of a room; and the child would sometimes repeat
it in pure fun “shaking with laughter”. When she was two years
seven months old she laughed on first hearing the name
“Periwinkle”.
In these and similar cases of the hilarious response to sounds we
seem to have, well within the first nine months, a germ of a feeling
for the odd or droll. The early development of this sense of the
funny in sounds is aided by their aggressive force for the infant’s
consciousness, and by the circumstance that for the young ear they
have pronounced characteristics which are probably lost as
development advances, and they are attended to, not for their own
sake, but merely as signs of things which interest us.
The psychical process involved in the transition may be described
as follows. Sounds, while by reason of their suddenness and
unexpectedness they are apt to take the consciousness off its guard
and to produce a kind of nervous shock, are of all sense-stimuli the
most exhilarating. The sudden rousing of the consciousness to a
large joyous commotion is the fundamental fact. Nor will the jar of
the shock, when the sense-organ develops and becomes hardier,
interfere with this. On the contrary, it will add something in the
shape of an agreeable rebound from a nascent attitude of
uneasiness.133 The laughter of the child at the first sounds of the
piano, which have frightened many a child and other young animal,
is, in part, a shout of victory. There is here, too, an element of
“sudden glory” in the rejoicing, as the new expanding self is dimly
conscious of its superiority to the half-alarmed and shrinking self of
the moment before. {211}
In this case, it is evident, we have to do with a greeting of the
laughable which will vary greatly according to the psycho-physical
condition of the child. The same child that laughs at a new sound to-
day will to-morrow, when in another mood, be disturbed by a quite
similar surprise of the ear.
But more is involved in this laughter. The sudden and slightly
disturbing attack of the ear by new sounds is apt to wear for the
child’s consciousness a game-like aspect. We have only to think of
the nursery rhymes, alluded to by Miss Shinn, in which the
excitement of fun is secured by an explosive shock at the end,
games closely analogous to the rides which terminated in a good
bump. In these rhymes the fun lies in the shock, though only half-
unexpected—a shock which has in it the very soul of frivolous play,
since it comes at the end of a series of quiet orderly sounds. May
not the new sounds, the guttural utterances and the rest, affect a
child in a like manner as a kind of disorderly play? For a child’s ear,
pitched for the intrinsic character of a sound, they may hold much
which is expressive of the play-mood. This will apply not only to
utterances like the “Pah! Pah!” which are clearly recognised as play,
but to many others produced by a nurse or a mother who is given to
entertaining. Perhaps the gurgling sounds which moved the mirth of
Preyer’s boy appeared laughter-like.
This tendency to look on certain sounds as a kind of play seems
to supply a psychical link in the development of a feeling for the odd
and out-of-the-way as such. We have seen how the play-impulse
“tries it on” when the restraints of rule grow too irksome. I suspect
that the mirthful appreciation of the queer and out-of-the-way grows
out of this inclination to a playful disorderliness or law-breaking. A
child is apt to feel oppressed with the rules of propriety {212} imposed
on him. By these rules quite a terrible multiplicity of noises is
branded as “naughty,” and the prohibition tends to fix the playful
impulse precisely in the direction of the forbidden sounds. Children
have a way, moreover, of projecting their experiences and their
inclinations into things which we call lifeless. What more natural,
then, that they should feel these incursions of violent and quite
improper-sounding noises to be a kind of playful throwing aside of
order and rule?
In the domain of the visible world, suddenness of presentation
rarely reaches, perhaps, the point of shock or joltiness. Yet there is
ample scope, here, too, for the working of the unexpected on the
child’s sensibilities. The first visual excitants of laughter, the sudden
uncovering of the face in bo-peep, the unexpected return of the
familiar face after an interval of absence, the instant transformation
of the accustomed features when the mother “makes a face,” show
how directly the surprisingly new may act on the young muscles of
laughter.
Here, too, we may see how the hilarious enjoyment of the new
and out-of-the-way emerges out of play-mirth. The distorted face of
the mother produces a laugh when it has ceased to alarm and is
taken as fun.134 According to one observer, this making of faces
grows into a standing pastime towards the end of the second year.135
Is not the greeting of the baby-face in the mirror, which in Ruth’s
case occurred on the 221st day (eighth month), and in that of
Preyer’s boy at the end of the ninth month, a kind of accost of a
newly discovered playmate? Perhaps the laughter of a little boy, of
one and a half year, already referred to, at the jumping of a ping-
pong ball and at a {213} spring-blind going up or coming down with a
run, expressed a recognition of something play-like.
This co-operation of the play-inclination in the perception of the
laughable in visual presentations is still more plainly illustrated in the
effect of actions and postures. The quickness of the eye of mirth for
expressions of the mood of romping play is seen in a child’s laughter,
already referred to, at the gambols of a horse or other animal. Ruth
was much entertained on her 441st day by the antics of a dog.
Especially enlivening is the appearance of quick, play-like
movements in grave elders addicted to decorous deportment. The
girl M., at the age of eighteen months, broke into boisterous
laughter on seeing her father as he ran to catch a train, with his
handkerchief hanging out of his pocket. This sudden revelation of
the playful temper may come to the child by way of postures and
expressions. The awful laws of propriety soon tend to give the look
of playful licence to certain bodily postures, especially that of lying
down. The boy C., when twenty months old, laughed heartily on
seeing his sister lying on the ground out of doors. Making faces,
pouting lips and the rest become playful just because they are felt to
be improper, the sort of thing one only does in a disorderly moment,
playful or other. May not the drolleries—to the child’s consciousness
—of animal form, for example the long neck of the giraffe, owe
something to suggestions of improper jocose actions, such as trying
to stretch oneself into Alice-like dimensions?
In this blithe recognition of the irregular in others’ behaviour we
have the rudiment of an appreciation of the laughable, not only as a
violation of rule but as a loss of dignity. This is apparent in such
cases as the boy’s laughter at the prostrate form of his sister,
illumined as {214} it was by the observation that, at the age of
twenty-six months, he expressed great contempt at the spectacle of
a Japanese gentleman stretched on the grass in the suburban
Heath, which was the child’s daily resort, and which he seemed
strongly disposed to subject to his own code of manners. Possibly,
too, there was a touch of this appreciation of lowered dignity when
the same boy, at the age of twenty-eight months, laughed greatly on
seeing his father batter in an old hat. The laughter, complicated now
by a new element of conscious superiority, probably took on a
crowing note, though our dull ears may not be equal to a clear
detection of the change. Not only so, it is possible that the laughter
of children, common in the second year, at signs of disorderliness in
the hair or dress of others, and especially superiors, implies a
perception of something like lowered rank.
In this effect of the new in the visible world different tones of
mirth are no doubt distinguishable. As the higher forms of
perception begin to develop the primitive laughter of joy may persist
and combine with later and more specialised kinds. Ruth’s voicing of
merriment, in the thirteenth month, on having a new pair of mittens
put on her, was largely an outburst of joy, though some dim sense of
the oddity of the thing probably combined with this. On the other
hand, the laughter called forth in the little girl M., at the age of
twenty-one months, by the spectacle of a doll that had lost its arms
presumably had in it, along with a sense of something weirdly
absurd in the mutilated form, a pretty keen sub-consciousness of
dollish proprieties set at defiance.
Other directions in the development of this early laughter at
entertaining spectacles may be said to have their origin in the fun of
play with its pretence or make-believe. Mrs. {215} Hogan’s boy, at the
age of two years and two months, would laugh at his nurse’s
pretended efforts to put on his shoes, which, instead of getting on,
flew away wildly into freedom. This laughter was evoked at the fun
of the thing, and probably involved an interpretation of the nurse’s
action as play. Yet it had in it also, I think, the trace of an
appreciation of the absurdity of the farcical collapse of effort. This is
borne out by the fact that the boy, about the same time, would also
laugh when the nurse, not in play, tried by jumping to hang a
garment on a nail just too high for her. He may, of course, have
regarded this, too, as but a continuation of the play. Yet it seems
reasonable to suppose that the merry current had one of its sources
in the perception of the amusing aspect of failure, of effort missing
its mark and lapsing into nothingness.
I confess to have been surprised at what looks like the precocity
of some children in the matter of honouring the proprieties of
conduct. The little girl M., when only fourteen months old, is said to
have laughed in an “absurdly conscious way” at a small boy who
stood by her perambulator asking for a kiss. That kiss, we are told,
was not forthcoming. Was the laugh merely an incident in a mood of
nervous shyness, or did it signify a dim perception of “bad form” on
the part of the proposer? Much care is needed in the interpretation
of such expressive reactions. A small boy of eighteen months
laughed when his pants slipped down. But this may only have
resulted from a sense of the fun of the irregularity of the proceeding,
aided perhaps by others’ amusement. A true feeling of shame is, of
course, not developed at this age; yet a child may have caught from
instruction a feeling of the shocking impropriety of an ill-timed
casting aside of the clothes-trammels. {216}
We may find in the laughter of the child, within the period of the
first three years, pretty clear indications of the development of a
rude perception of amusing incongruities in dress and behaviour. The
young eye has a keen outlook for the proprieties in the matter of
clothes. Ruth, who was in the thirteenth month amused at seeing
her new mittens put on, showed amusement about the same date
when her pink bonnet was put on her aunt’s head. In this case, the
play-significance of the action for the child’s consciousness is
apparent. It seems fairly certain, indeed, that this higher form of a
recognition of the laughable grows out of the play-interpretation.
When at play children not only throw off rules of decorum and do
improper things, they put aside ideas of appropriateness and launch
out into bizarre discontinuities and contrarieties of action and
speech. The play-attitude, as lawless and free, tends to
inconsequence. Hence the readiness with which a child interprets
such inconsequences as play.
It is the same when a child laughs at droll stories of the doings of
animals and persons. He may take fables and other fancies seriously
enough at times, but if his mind is pitched for merriment, he will
greatly appreciate the extravagant unsuitabilities of behaviour of the
heroes of his nursery books. The little girl M., when two years seven
months old, laughed gaily at a passage in a story about kittens, in
which they are made to say, “Waiter, this cat’s meat is tough;”
asking in the midst of her merriment, “Did you ever saw such funny
tits?”
Along with this rudiment of merry appreciation of the spectacle
of the incongruous, we have the first crude manifestation of the
closely related feeling of amusement at the absurd. Children are said
to have no measure of the probable and possible, and to accept the
wildest fancies in {217} unquestioning faith. Yet experience begins her
educative work during these first three years, and one may detect
sporadic traces of a feeling for what is gloriously incredible. A boy,
already alluded to, aged about one and a half year, laughed as his
aunt asked him what the waves, which he was gravely observing,
were saying. The boy C., when twenty-two months old, grew quite
hilarious over the idea of flying up into the air. Some one had
suggested his flying like a bird, and he proceeded to cap the
suggestion, adding, “Tit (sister) fy air,” “gee-gee (horse) fy air”. The
last idea of a flying horse especially delighted one innocent, as yet,
of Greek mythology.
Lastly, a bare allusion may be made to the early development of
an appreciation of word-play and the lighter kind of wit. That this
grows out of the play-element, the love of pretence, is at once
evident. Verbal fun, “trying it on” with an incorrect use of words and
so forth, is a common outlet of the rollicking spirits of childhood.
Mrs. Hogan’s boy, at the age of one year eight months, developed a
fancy for calling things by their wrong names, a knife a “fork,” for
example. Ruth did the same towards the end of the third year. The
fun derived from punning seems to be immense in the case of many
children at the close of our period, as when a boy on hearing his
mother say she had just called on Mrs. Fawkes asked, “Did you call
on Mrs. knives too?” This easy childish mode of satisfying a jocose
bent is seen also in the use of false statements, not seriously, but “in
fun,” as the child has it. Ruth had a fit of such merry fibbing at the
end of the third year. A child will often “try on” this kind of verbal
game, when called up for a moral lesson.136
This same roguish impulse to “try it on” with the {218} authorities
leads to something like a play of wit in repartee. The merry
interchange of intellectual attack and defence, which relieves so
many serious relations of adult life, grows naturally enough in the
case of children out of their relation of subjection to the grown-ups.
The playful experiment in the direction of disobedience is frequently
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