Laughter is an important non-verbal human social signal. Clarifying the mechanism of laughing would be useful in a variety of studies on health or sociology. In this paper we introduce a non-invasive multisensory system for real-time laughter detection and analysis. We focus only on the audio laughter recognition, present the preliminary results we obtained, and discuss the possible application...

Background: Old age is associated with the physical and psychological problems that affect the Quality of Life (QoL). Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the effect of laughter therapy on the QoL of elderly people in nursing homes. Materials & Methods: This was a quasi-experimental study with‌ pretest-posttest along with control and experimental group and one-month follow-up conducted...

Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization that occur often in continuous speech. It is produced by the speech production mechanism using a highly variable physiological process. The vocalized expression of laughter varies across gender, individuals and context. Despite its variability, laughter is perceived naturally by humans. Since laughter is produced by the human speech production mechanism, spe...

Emotions can be recognized by audible paralinguistic cues in speech. By detecting these paralinguistic cues that can consist of laughter, a trembling voice, coughs, changes in the intonation contour etc., information about the speaker’s state and emotion can be revealed. This paper describes the development of a gender-independent laugh detector with the aim to enable automatic emotion recognit...

OBJECTIVE This study explored outcomes of Laughter Yoga in adults with Parkinson׳s disease (PD) and their caregivers. Laughter has been shown to generally improve mood in physically healthy adults, and specifically in adults with heart disease or cancer, but little research exists regarding the impact of laughter in adults with Parkinson׳s disease. Low mood is frequently a co-morbid condition f...

CONTEXT Research shows that laughter has myriad health benefits, yet the medical community has not implemented it formally as a treatment. Patients awaiting organ transplantation have significant physical disabilities and are at risk for psychological distress. Attenuated heart rate variability (HRV) is a risk factor for a negative long-term outcome in some patients. OBJECTIVE The study inten...

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of a therapeutic laughter program and the number of program sessions on anxiety, depression, and stress in breast cancer patients. A randomized controlled trial was conducted involving 31 patients who received four sessions of therapeutic laughter program comprised and 29 who were assigned to the no-program control group. Scores for anxiety, d...