NVU professor lands fellowship and $500k grant to research humor in babies

Aug. 12, 2022  |  By Lisa Scagliotti 

Professor Gina Mireault. Courtesy photo

Northern Vermont University this summer announced that Professor Gina Mireault, Ph.D., has been awarded a $547,000 research grant from the National Institutes of Health and was named a Vermont State Colleges Systems Faculty Fellow for the upcoming academic year.

Mireault, who lives in Waterbury Center, is a professor of psychology and chair of the NVU-Johnson Psychology and Human Services Department. The  NIH Support for Research Excellence program has awarded her a grant of $547,156 to fund her proposed research titled, “Infants’ Understanding of Violations of Expectation: The Role of Social Agents and Repetition.”

An expert in humor in babies and young children, Mireault for more than 20 years has studied childhood emotional development. She explores children’s perceptions of humor and the impact it has on their social and emotional development. 

In 2016, she co-authored the book, “Humor in Infants: Developmental and Psychological Perspectives,” with colleague Vasudevi Reddy, Ph.D., a professor of Developmental and Cultural Psychology at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom. Published by Springer International Publishing, the book is a text for researchers, clinicians, and graduate students in developmental psychology, infant mental health, social psychology, cognitive science, and pediatrics.

Her current work focuses on the perception and creation of humor in infants aged 3 to 12 months. She has presented at major peer-reviewed conferences and her work has been cited in national and international publications.

The NIH award will fund two research studies over four years that bring together two separate bodies of research: studies of surprise, and studies of humor in infants, Mireault explained. The project will investigate “why it is that infants find some unexpected events surprising and some funny,” she said. 

Up to 20 undergraduate students will gain first hand research experience on the project. “They will collect data, code and enter it, analyze it, and present the findings at regional and national conferences.”

Mireault was also one of two tenured faculty to be named a state colleges faculty fellow for the 2022-23 academic year. The fellowship includes a reduction in teaching load for one semester and a stipend to support work on a specific project.

Mireault’s fellowship project will explore how to better integrate NVU’s Learning and Working Community educational philosophy into the psychology program at NVU. The approach looks to incorporate experiences outside of the classroom into the curriculum and reduce the cost of education, Mireault said. She will look to several other colleges in the South and Midwest offering psychology degrees for examples that could be incorporated into the program at NVU.