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 ...

OBJECTIVES The study objectives were to evaluate the efficacy of integrating hatha yoga therapy with therapeutic exercises for osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee joints. DESIGN This was a prospective, randomized, active controlled trial. Two hundred and fifty (250) participants who had OA knees and who were between 35 and 80 years (yoga 59.56±9.54) and (control 59.42±10.66) from the outpatient d...

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...

Laughter is a key element of human-human interaction, occurring surprisingly frequently in multi-party conversation. In meetings, laughter accounts for almost 10% of vocalization effort by time, and is known to be relevant for topic segmentation and the automatic characterization of affect. We present a system for the detection of laughter, and its attribution to specific participants, which re...

The aim of the Multimodal and Multiperson Corpus of Laughter in Interaction (MMLI) was to collect multimodal data of laughter with the focus on full body movements and different laughter types. It contains both induced and interactive laughs from human triads. In total we collected 500 laugh episodes of 16 participants. The data consists of 3D body position information, facial tracking, multipl...

Yoga is believed to have beneficial effects on cognition, attenuation of emotional intensity and stress reduction. Previous studies were mainly performed on eastern experienced practitioners or unhealthy subjects undergoing concomitant conventional therapies. Further investigation is needed on the effects of yoga per se, as well as its possible preventive benefits on healthy subjects. We invest...