The social nature of laughter invites people to laugh together. This joint vocal action often results in overlapping laughter. In this paper, we show that the acoustics of overlapping laughs are different from non-overlapping laughs. We found that overlapping laughs are stronger prosodically marked than nonoverlapping ones, in terms of higher values for duration, mean F0, mean and maximum inten...

Unspecified Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: http://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-77682 Accepted Version Originally published at: Ruch, Willibald (1997). Afterword: Laughter and Temperament. In: Ekman, Paul; Rosenberg, E L. What the face reveals : basic and applied studies of spontaneous expression using the facial action coding system (FACS). New York: Oxf...

Humour and laughter have often been portrayed as fundamentally cultural and social phenomena. They can be used to tell us about children's ability to engage socially and to understand others, but have rarely been explored for this purpose. The present paper summarises the results of a study of simple forms of humour in children with Down syndrome and with autism, two groups which are reported t...

Humans express laughter differently depending on the context: polite titters of agreement are very different from explosions of mirth. Using functional MRI, we explored the neural responses during passive listening to authentic amusement laughter and controlled, voluntary laughter. We found greater activity in anterior medial prefrontal cortex (amPFC) to the deliberate, Emitted Laughs, suggesti...

Motivational interviewing (MI) is a goal oriented psychotherapy involving natural conversation between a counselor and a client to instill motivation towards behavioral change in the client. Often during such an interaction, the counselor and client express themselves through nonverbal cues such as laughter. We analyze the role of laughters during MI sessions. Specifically, we perform a set of ...

Although laughter is an important aspect of nonverbal vocalization, its acoustic properties are still not fully understood. Extreme articulation during laughter production, such as wide jaw opening, suggests that laughter can have very high first formant (F(1)) frequencies. We measured fundamental frequency and formant frequencies of the vowels produced in the vocalic segments of laughter. Voca...

Trying to automatically detect laughter and other nonlinguistic events in speech raises a fundamental question: Is it appropriate to simply adopt acoustic features that have traditionally been used for analyzing linguistic events? Thus we take a step back and propose syllabic-level features that may show a contrast between laughter and speech in their intensity-, pitch-, and timbral-contours an...

Although laughter forms an important part of human non-verbal communication, it has received rather less attention than it deserves in both the experimental and the observational literatures. Relaxed social (Duchenne) laughter is associated with feelings of wellbeing and heightened affect, a proximate explanation for which might be the release of endorphins. We tested this hypothesis in a serie...

This paper presents the results of an analysis of the representative sounds of human laughter from a large corpus of naturally-occurring conversational speech. Two contrasting manners of laughter were categorized for the study: polite formal laughs and sincere mirthful laughs, and a formant analysis was performed on four phonetic classes of laugh therein. Laughing speech was also common in the ...

The extraction of sound events in environments where a large number of people are present is a challenging problem. In order to tackle that problem, we have been developing a sound environment intelligence system which is able to get information about who is talking, where and when, based on integration of multiple microphone arrays and human tracking technologies. We installed the developed sy...