Haye Andrés, Torres-Sahli Manuel
Faculty of Social Sciences, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
Center for Corporate Governance and Society, ESE Business School, Universidad de Los Andes, Santiago, Chile.
Front Psychol. 2025 Jun 13;16:1606683. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1606683. eCollection 2025.
Laughter is increasingly investigated in ageing discourse, yet its ideological functions remain unclear. This paper examines how laughter functions as an ideological symptom in the discourse of older adults regarding aging. Drawing from Voloshinov's dialogical theory, we conceptualize laughter not merely as an emotional response, but as an ideological symptom revealing tensions between what is said and what remains assumed.
Four focus-group interviews with Chilean participants ( = 20; age 60-86) were analysed with a three-phase qualitative methodology combining thematic, dialogical and comparative techniques.
Laughter reliably marked interactional hotspots where talk about dependency, mortality and ageist stereotypes became sensitive. It acted as an embodied enthymeme that exposed-and regulated-tension between personal narratives and dominant ageing imaginaries. Gender and class shaped these patterns: women's humour negotiated autonomy within family relations, whereas men's joking resisted the figure of the "useless old man".
Framing laughter as an ideological symptom shows how affect and normativity are related in later-life discourse, extending critical-gerontology debates and providing a replicable toolset for multimodal data.
在老龄化话语中，笑声越来越受到研究，但它的意识形态功能仍不明确。本文探讨了笑声在老年人关于衰老的话语中如何作为一种意识形态症状发挥作用。借鉴沃洛希诺夫的对话理论，我们将笑声不仅仅概念化为一种情感反应，而是作为一种揭示所说内容与所假定内容之间紧张关系的意识形态症状。
采用结合主题、对话和比较技术的三阶段定性方法，对与智利参与者（n = 20；年龄60 - 86岁）进行的四次焦点小组访谈进行了分析。
笑声可靠地标记了互动热点，在这些热点中，关于依赖、死亡和年龄歧视刻板印象的谈论变得敏感。它作为一种具体体现的省略推理法，暴露并调节了个人叙述与占主导地位的衰老想象之间的紧张关系。性别和阶级塑造了这些模式：女性的幽默在家庭关系中协商自主性，而男性的玩笑则抵制“无用老人”的形象。
将笑声视为一种意识形态症状，展示了情感与规范性在晚年话语中的关联，扩展了批判性老年学的辩论，并为多模态数据提供了一套可复制的工具集。
