Laurel van der Toorn

He is a psychology professor at the University of Ottawa, and his name is Jean-Francois Bureau.

Jean-Francois, welcome to the show.

It's nice to chat with you.

Thank you, David.

Let's talk about this profound question about parenting science.

I feel like this is about crying babies, not laughing ones.

I feel like psychologists have been getting this wrong, studying the wrong thing.

What made you want to look at laughter?

So tell me about laughter.

Tell me how it's a kind of social glue that connects a father and a child.

What's going on when we laugh with our children?

This is really what we want to look at.

And laughter with mom is different than laughter with dad?

That seems so, I don't know, striking to me that laughter can mean something coming from a different parent.

It sounds really interesting, that stereotype that dad's the fun parent and mom is the responsible one.

I think it's important to blow that up a little bit.

But in some ways, your study kind of reinforces it, too.

Well, I do want to get into the deep psychology of dad jokes at the end of the interview.

This isn't just us chatting and your opinion.

You did a research paper.