BACKGROUND Laughter Yoga founded by M. Kataria is a combination of unconditioned laughter and yogic breathing. Its effect on mental and physical aspects of healthy individuals was shown to be beneficial. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to compare the effectiveness of Kataria's Laughter Yoga and group exercise therapy in decreasing depression and increasing life satisfaction in older...

If we laugh at a ]oke we are likely to think it funny, and funnier situations are expected to cause more laughter and more positive judgments (Calvert, 1949, Zigler, Levme, & Could, 1966) Common sense and psychological theories (Rosenberg, 1^0) suggest that a person's attitudes (evaluations) and emotional reactions are hkely to be consistent But does this consistency between laughter and evalua...

In this paper we present first results of two online surveys designed to investigate, which kind of recorded, human laughter appears to be most naturally to a human observer in combination with body movements of two different humanoid robots. As humans most often laugh within a social context [1, 2], which in turn influences the style of their laughter, we told the participants of both surveys ...

Conversation is widely studied through corpus analysis, often concentrating on ‘task-based’ interactions such as information gap activities (map-tasks [1], spot the difference [2], ranking items [3]) and real or staged business meetings [4], [5]. This task-based dialogue (on which spoken dialogue technology is based [6]) relies heavily on verbal information exchange. However, the immediate task...

Research studies of laughter in children are reviewed, and a model describing eliciting conditions for laughter and related behavior is described. Following Spencer (1860), Berlyne (I960), and others, it is proposed that laughter occurs after conditions of heightened tension or arousal when at the same time there is a judgment that the situation is safe or inconsequential. The special case of l...

Laughter is a powerful means of emotion expression which has not yet been used in speech synthesis. The current paper reports on a pilot study in which differently created types of laughter were combined with synthetic speech in a dialogical situation. A perception test assessed the effect on perceived social bonding as well as the appropriateness of the laughter. Results indicate that it is cr...

The AVLaughterCycle project aims at developing an audiovisual laughing machine, capable of recording the laughter of a user and to respond to it with a machine-generated laughter linked with the input laughter. During the project, an audiovisual laughter database was recorded, including facial points tracking, thanks to the Smart Sensor Integration software developed by the University of Augsbu...

Significant progress in the domains of speechand singingsynthesis has enhanced communicative potential of machines. To make computers more vocally expressive, however, we need a deeper understanding of how nonlinguistic social signals are patterned and perceived. In this paper, we focus on laughter expressions: how a phrase of vocalized notes that we call “laughter” may be modeled and performed...

Darwin (1872) and Hecker (1873) suggested that laughter induced by tickle and by humour share common underlying mechanisms. Seventy-two undergraduate students participated in a study designed to explore the relationship between the two phenomena. Subjects were tickled before and after viewing comedy and control videotapes. Subjects exhibiting more pronounced laughter to comedy also laughed more...

Laughter recognition is an underexplored area of research. Our goal in this work was to develop an accurate and efficient method to recognize laughter segments, ultimately for the purpose of speaker recognition. Previous work has classified presegmented data as to the presence of laughter using SVMs, GMMs, and HMMs. In this work, we have extended the stateof-the-art in laughter recognition by e...