Laughter is one of the most important paralinguistic events, and it has specific roles in human conversation. The automatic detection of laughter occurrences in human speech can aid automatic speech recognition systems as well as some paralinguistic tasks such as emotion detection. In this study we apply Deep Neural Networks (DNN) for laughter detection, as this technology is nowadays considere...

Patients with pathological laughter and crying (PLC) are subject to relatively uncontrollable episodes of laughter, crying or both. The episodes occur either without an apparent triggering stimulus or following a stimulus that would not have led the subject to laugh or cry prior to the onset of the condition. PLC is a disorder of emotional expression rather than a primary disturbance of feeling...

Laughter is a highly variable signal, and can express a spectrum of emotions. This makes the automatic detection of laughter a challenging but interesting task. We perform automatic laughter detection using audio-visual data from the AMI Meeting Corpus. Audio-visual laughter detection is performed by combining (fusing) the results of a separate audio and video classifier on the decision level. ...

Laughter or smile is one of the emotional expressions of pleasantness with characteristic contraction of the facial muscles, of which the neural substrate remains to be explored. This currently described study is the first to investigate the generation of human facial expression of pleasant emotion using positron emission tomography and H(2)(15)O. Regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) during laug...

This article examines re search evidence for the popu lar idea that humor and laughter have beneficial ef fects on physical health. Poten tial theoretical mechanisms for such effects are discussed first. Empirical evidence for benefi cial effects of humor and laughter on immunity, pain tolerance, blood pressure, lon gevity, and illness symptoms is then summarized. Overall, the evidence for heal...

Laughter matters! From an analysis of a very large corpus of naturally-occurring conversational speech we have confirmed that approximately one in ten utterances contains laughter. From among these laughing utterances, we were able to distinguish four types of laughter according to what each revealed about the speaker’s affective state, and we were able to recognise these different types automa...

In his pioneering work, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin (1872/1965) argued that laughter was outward expression mirth. 150 years since publication this book, research has revealed is substantially more complex, nuanced, socially important than theorized. current special issue highlights recent discoveries regarding nature illuminates numerous themes. These include impo...

Although listeners are able to decode the underlying emotions embedded in acoustical laughter sounds, little is known about the acoustical cues that differentiate between the emotions. This study investigated the acoustical correlates of laughter expressing four different emotions: joy, tickling, taunting, and schadenfreude. Analysis of 43 acoustic parameters showed that the four emotions could...

This paper presents a quantitative description of laughter in height 1-hour French spontaneous conversations. The paper includes the raw figures for laughter as well as more details concerning inter-individual variability. It firstly describes to what extent the amount of laughter and their durations varies from speaker to speaker in all dialogs. In a second suite of analyses, this paper compar...

The study explores the experiences of volunteer community care workers working with HIV-affected families, participating in laughter therapy. Laughter therapy is being used as an intervention to positively influence individuals experiencing various forms of emotional distress. Community care workers play a vital role in the support of the HIV/AIDS-infected and -affected members in communities. ...