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Infants don't laugh at anything in particular. They may smile or coo at their parents, but that is certainly not laughing at anybody in particular. As they grow older they do find certain things to be funny. This comes about from several reasons.

• Somebody tripping and falling - well that is indeed funny - and you have to be taught not to laugh at it.
• Somebody who is different either unusually fat or tall or who has a disability may not necessarily be funny but the child will laugh at that person because he feels uneasy about the difference.
• When a parent or somebody in authority laughs at somebody who is different in any way then the child may well learn to laugh as well. It is a natural reaction when following what the authority figure does. In other words, you can learn to find something funny which ordinarily would not be funny.

Thus, in certain countries including the United States many people will laugh at somebody who has an accent that is different from the local accent. Whether it's an accent accepted in a different part of the country or an accent of a person from another country.

In Israel, on the other hand, people do not laugh at accents. Israel is an immigrant country and it's just not a funny issue.

In other words, the concept of laughing at an accent is learned. It is not something that comes naturally.

This does not mean that in Israel people do not laugh at a person's country of origin. They do and they genralize the country of origin and they might laugh at all people from that country showing a specific cultural bias.

However, laughing at a specific person who has a specific accent is not common in Israel as it is in certain other Western countries.

The concept of laughing at a person rather than with a person is thus learned and could be unlearned just as well.

It behooves a parent to teach a child the difference between laughing at a person and laughing with a person.

There is also the concept of laughing at terminology. For example, the word idiot in Israel is considered a very very serious attack on a person. The person might react violently after being called an idiot.

However, after being trained that the term idiot reflects a certain level of intelligence and that certain people with a lower intelligence are assigned that category and that it is a legitimate psychological term, those people who laughed at the term no longer laugh at it in my experience and they have stopped using it in a denigrating manner.

Laughing at terminology thus also is a learned experience which can be terminated.

A psychologist, psychiatrist, or psychotherapist is a person in authority. That person can easily change the way that people look at and accept these concepts and terms and they can relate to them differently.