Pathological laughter is an uncommon symptom usually caused by bilateral, diffuse cerebral lesions. It has rarely been reported in association with isolated cerebral lesions. Midbrain involvement causing pathological laughter is extremely unusual. We describe three patients who developed pathological laughter after midbrain and pontine-midbrain infarction. In two patients a small infarction in ...

We have analyzed over 13000 bouts of laughter, in over 65 hours of unscripted, naturally occurring multiparty meetings, to identify discriminative contexts of voiced and unvoiced laughter. Our results show that, in meetings, laughter is quite frequent, accounting for almost 10% of all vocal activity effort by time. Approximately a third of all laughter is unvoiced, but meeting participants vary...

Laughter is an ancient signal of social communication among humans and non-human primates. Laughter types with complex social functions (e.g., taunt and joy) presumably evolved from the unequivocal and reflex-like social bonding signal of tickling laughter already present in non-human primates. Here, we investigated the modulations of cerebral connectivity associated with different laughter typ...

Social, psychological, and physiological studies have provided evidence indicating that laughter imposes an increased demand on trunk muscles. It was the aim of this study to quantify the activation of trunk muscles during laughter yoga in comparison with crunch and back lifting exercises regarding the mean trunk muscle activity. Muscular activity during laughter yoga exercises was measured by ...

We have analyzed over 13000 bouts of laughter, in over 65 hours of unscripted, naturally occurring multi-party meetings, to identify discriminative contexts of voiced and unvoiced laughter. Our results show that, in meetings, laughter is quite frequent, accounting for almost 10% of all vocal activity effort by time. Approximately a third of all laughter is unvoiced, but meeting participants var...

Humans have the ability to replicate the emotional expressions of others even when they undergo different emotions. Such distinct responses of expressions, especially positive expressions, play a central role in everyday social communication of humans and may give the responding individuals important advantages in cooperation and communication. The present work examined laughter in chimpanzees ...

In this paper we propose an overview of a project aiming at building an audio-visual laughter synthesis system. The same approach is followed for acoustic and visual synthesis. First a database has been built to have synchronous audio and 3D visual landmarks tracking data. Then this data has been used to build HMM models of acoustic laughter and visual laughter separately. Visual laughter model...

Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization that occurs often in speech communication. Since laughter is produced by the speech production mechanism, spectral analysis methods are used mostly for the study of laughter acoustics. In this paper the significance of excitation features for discriminating laughter and speech is discussed. New features describing the excitation characteristics are used to a...

We explore the effect of laughter perception and response in terms of engagement in human-robot interaction. We designed two distinct experiments in which the robot has two modes: laughter responsive and laughter non-responsive. In responsive mode, the robot detects laughter using a multimodal real-time laughter detection module and invokes laughter as a backchannel to users accordingly. In non...

Objective • The aim of this review is to identiiy, critically evaluate, and summarize the laughter literature across a number of fields related to medicine and health care to assess to what extent laughter health-related benefits are currently supported by empirical evidence. Data Sources and Study Selection • A comprehensive laughter literature search was performed. A thorough search of the gr...