We analyzed the social interactions of children by collecting data in a science classroom of a Japanese elementary school using our developed system that can identify who is talking, when, and where in an environment, based on the integration of multiple microphone arrays and human tracking technologies. In the present work, among the sound activities in the classroom, we focused on laughter ev...

Savage BM, Lujan HL, Thipparthi RR, DiCarlo SE. Humor, laughter, learning, and health! A brief review. Adv Physiol Educ 41: 341–347, 2017; doi:10.1152/advan.00030.2017.—Human emotions, such as anxiety, depression, fear, joy, and laughter, profoundly affect psychological and physiological processes. These emotions form a set of basic, evolved functions that are shared by all humans. Laughter is ...

Laughter is a key signal in human communication, conveying information about our emotional state but also providing social feedback to the conversational partners. With the development of more and more natural humancomputer interactions (with the help of embodied conversational agents, etc.), the need emerged to enable computers to understand and express emotions. In particular, to enhance huma...

Laryngeal muscle electromyography (EMG) and measures of the behavior of the respiratory system have been made during spontaneous laughter in two groups of subjects. The smaller group also had a direct measure of tracheal pressure during this behavior. Laryngeal adductors such as the thyroarytenoid (TA) and lateral cricoarytenoid (LCA) exhibited brief high-amplitude bursts of activity, at a rate...

A 13-year-old boy presented with recurrent episodes of sudden brief posturing of the right upper and lower limbs accompanied by transient inability to speak and a tendency to smile which would sometimes break into laughter. Awareness was retained during the attack, and there was no associated emotional abnormality. The events were precipitated by walking and occurred several times in a day. The...

A 60-year-old, right-handed female presented with episodes of pathological laughter and left hemiparesis. She had no history of traumatic brain injury, or neurological or psychiatric disease, and showed no signs of drug or alcohol abuse. Neurological examination found moderate left hemiparesis. Her face was symmetrical with intact emotional expression. The episodes of pathological laughter had ...

Humans are intrinsically social animals, forming enduring affiliative bonds [1]. However, a striking minority with psychopathic traits, who present with violent and antisocial behaviors, tend to value other people only insofar as they contribute to their own advancement [2, 3]. Extant research has addressed the neurocognitive processes associated with aggression in such individuals, but we know...

Laughter is increasingly present in biomedical literature, both in analytical neurological aspects and in applied therapeutic fields. The present paper, bridging between the analytical and the applied, explores the potential of a relevant variable of laughter’s acoustic signature—entropy—in the detection of a widespread mental disorder, depression, as well as in gauging the severity of its diag...