ABSTRACT
This chapter explains older children’s and adolescents’ capacities for fear, anger and sadness than about their experiences of joy and happiness. However, there are several different types of positive emotion, beyond general happiness. The origins of these various shades of happiness lie in infancy and early childhood. Acquiring new skills may also induce infants’ signs of happiness. Bridges’ theory of the early differentiation of emotion claimed that the infant’s initial capacity for delight began to transform into signs of elation and joy over the first two years of life. Infants not only laugh at things they find amusing, but they also try to make their companions laugh. Mutual laughter and silliness is an important component of parent-infant relationships. Parents of young infants often do deliberately silly things, in an attempt to get their infants to smile or laugh; absurd nonverbal behaviour shown by parents is often referred to as ‘clowning’.
