post traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) is a disorder of emotional and mental stress occurring as an outcome of injury or severe emotional shock. yoga may be useful in decrease of ptsd symptomology. new studies demonstrate that people suffering from ptsd can find actual relief with yoga. yoga decreases stress-induced allosteric load in three reactive systems of stress: the autonomic nervous syste...

Laughter is an important communicative signal in humanhuman communication. However, very few attempts have been made to model laughter animation synthesis for virtual characters. This paper reports our work to model hilarious laughter. We have developed a generator for face and body motions that takes as input the sequence of pseudophonemes of laughter and each pseudo-phoneme’s duration time. L...

Laughter is one of the most characteristic –and enigmatic– communicational traits of human individuals. Its analysis has to take into account a variety of emotional, social, cognitive, and communicational factors densely interconnected. In this article we study laughter just as an auditive signal (as a ‘neutral’ information carrier), and we compare its structure with the regular traits of lingu...

Automatic speech understanding in natural multiparty conversation settings stands to gain from parsing not only verbal but also non-verbal vocal communicative behaviors. In this work, we study the most frequently annotated non-verbal behavior, laughter, whose detection has clear implications for speech understanding tasks, and for the automatic recognition of affect in particular. To complement...

Although laughter can occur in various sequential (horizontal) patterns that have been well described, the voice quality components that can occur in laughter also need to be described in order to constitute a vertical array of possible phonetic contrasts. These components have been referred to as ‘states of the larynx’ and interact with pitch and with the ‘segmental’ components of laughter in ...

In this paper we describe a mobile and wearable devices app that recognises laughter from speech in real-time. The laughter detection is based on a deep neural network architecture, which runs smoothly and robustly, even natively on a smartwatch. Further, this paper presents results demonstrating that our approach achieves state-of-the-art laughter detection performance on the SSPNet Vocalizati...

Yoga is an ancient tradition that in contemporary research has been shown to have positive associations with a broad spectrum of health outcomes. Although promising findings have been highlighted, research exploring the mechanisms underlying the use of yoga for enhancing mental health is still in its infancy. Researchers have shown that yoga can increase levels of mindfulness, which has been sh...

The erudite author tries to present in this article a gist of Swami Vivekananda's concept of Jnana Yoga, Raja Yoga, Karma Yoga and Bhakti Yoga.