ReviewBiology letters2020
Just kidding: the evolutionary roots of playful teasing.
Review in Biology letters, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 32 citations in OpenAlex.
- Evidence of self-care tooling and phylogenetic modeling reveal parrot tool use is not rare.iScience · 2025Article
- Nuancing 'Emotional' Social Play: Does Play Behaviour Always Underlie a Positive Emotional State?Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Review
- Spontaneous playful teasing in four great ape species.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Overcoming bias in the comparison of human language and animal communication.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Robert Provine: the critical human importance of laughter, connections and contagion.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Laughter, play faces and mimicry in animals: evolution and social functions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Visual bodily signals as core devices for coordinating minds in interaction.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- The Complexity and Phylogenetic Continuity of Laughter and Smiles in Hominids.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Games and enculturation: A cross-cultural analysis of cooperative goal structures in Austronesian games.PloS one · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Accounts of teasing have a long history in psychological and sociological research, yet teasing itself is vastly underdeveloped as a topic of study. As a phenomenon that moves along the border between aggression and play, teasing presents an opportunity to investigate key foundations of social and mental life. Developmental studies suggest that preverbal human infants already playfully tease their parents by performing 'the unexpected,' apparently deliberately violating the recipient's expectations to create a shared humorous experience. Teasing behaviour may be phylogenetically old and perhaps an evolutionary precursor to joking. In this review, we present preliminary evidence suggesting that non-human primates also exhibit playful teasing. In particular, we argue that great apes display three types of playful teasing described in preverbal human infants: teasing with offer and withdrawal, provocative non-compliance and disrupting others' activities. We highlight the potential of this behaviour to provide a window into complex socio-cognitive processes such as attribution of others' expectations and, finally, we propose directions for future research and call for systematic studies of teasing behaviour in non-human primates.
Indexed as
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.