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...

Laughter is often considered a stereotyped and distinctively human signal of positive emotion. Yet, acoustic analyses reveal a great deal of variability in laugh acoustics, and that changes in laughter sounds need not signal comparable changes in emotional state. There is simply not enough evidence to know whether laugh acoustics have specific, well-defined signaling value. However, there is ev...

Laughter is an auditory stimulus that powerfully conveys positive emotion. We investigated how laughter influenced the visual perception of facial expressions. We presented a sound clip of laughter simultaneously with a happy, a neutral, or a sad schematic face. The emotional face was briefly presented either alone or among a crowd of neutral faces. We used a matching method to determine how la...

Laughter commonly occurs in daily interactions, and is not only simply related to funny situations, but also for expressing some type of attitude, having important social functions in communication. The background of the present work is generation of natural motions in a humanoid robot, so that miscommunication might be caused if there is mismatch between audio and visual modalities, especially...

Laughter can not only convey the affective state of the speaker but also be perceived differently based on the context in which it is used. In this paper, we focus on detecting laughter in adults’ speech using the MAHNOB laughter database. The paper explores the use of novel long-term acoustic features to capture the periodic nature of laughter and the use of computer vision-based smile feature...

Laughter is often associated with happiness but recent studies show that there are actually five types of Filipino laughter and these are happiness, giddiness, excitement, embarrassment, and hurtful laughter. Facial expressions and vocalization related to Filipino laughter have been the focus in many studies, however body movements with regards to laughter are still left unexplored. The main fo...

Pathological laughter was stimulated by pursuit eye movements with a large extramedullary brainstem tumour. Laughter was also evoked by intense direct light. The mechanism by which visual stimuli could induce pathological laughter is discussed.

From infancy laughter is a right-brain-to-rightbrain attachment behavior mutually aroused and regulated within the caregiver–infant partnership. Laughter continues to be attachment behavior throughout life with potential for enhancing attachment bonds or for defending against them. Laughter in psychotherapy has primarily been viewed as a discharge phenomena with typical interpretations focused ...

Laughter is an intrinsic component of human-human interaction, and current automatic speech understanding paradigms stand to gain significantly from its detection and modeling. In the current work, we produce a manual segmentation of laughter in a large corpus of interactive multi-party seminars, which promises to be a valuable resource for acoustic modeling purposes. More importantly, we quant...