BACKGROUND Pathological laughter can be a sign of epilepsy, psychiatric illness, effect of toxins or psychotropic drugs or of structural brain disease. METHOD Case Studies. RESULT Two patients developed inappropriate uncontrollable laughter following intravenous sodium valproate for treatment of epilepsy. CONCLUSION Pathological laughter can be a side effect of intravenous sodium valproate.

This work focuses on the demonstration of previously achieved results in the automatic detection of laughter from natural discourses. In the previous work features of two different modalities, namely audio and video from unobtrusive sources, were used to build a system of recurrent neural networks called Echo State networks to model the dynamics of laughter. This model was then again utilized t...

AIM To investigate the effects of laughter therapy on depression, cognitive function, quality of life, and sleep of the elderly in a community. METHODS Between July and September 2007, the total study sample consisted of 109 subjects aged over 65 divided into two groups; 48 subjects in the laughter therapy group and 61 subjects in the control group. The subjects in the laughter therapy group ...

We describe an interactive system that uses gesture recognition to enhance the yoga experience through visual, auditory and olfactory feedback. Ancient theories associated with Kundalini yoga provide the theoretical basis for this research. The sensory feedback provided by the Therapeutic Interactive Yoga System promotes an immersive, multisensory experience that corresponds to the system of se...

Humor and laughter can be effective self-care tools to cope with stress. An ability to find humor gives us a sense of perspective on our problems. Laughter provides a physical release for accumulated tension. The article reviews research on the effect of humor and laughter on our immune function and resilience to stress. Resources for finding humor are included.

Various brain areas in both cortical as well as subcortical locations are involved in pathological laughter. Pathological laughter may be seen as a prodromal symptom or acute manifestation or late sequel of stroke. Various other neuropsychiatric conditions attribute to stroke. It is often difficult to ascertain the cause of pathological laughter in the presence of multiple brain pathologies. He...

Laughter is a very complex behavior that communicates a wide range of messages with different meanings. It is highly dependent on social and interpersonal attributes. Most of the previous works (e.g. [1, 2]) on automatic laughter detection from audio uses frame-level acoustic features as parameters to train their machine learning techniques, such as Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs), Support Vecto...

BACKGROUND Yoga seems to be an effective means to cope with a variety of internal medicine conditions. While characteristics of yoga users have been investigated in the general population, little is known about predictors of yoga use and barriers to yoga use in internal medicine patients. The aim of this cross-sectional analysis was to identify sociodemographic, clinical, and psychological pred...

Research on beneficial consequences of yoga focuses on the effects of yogic breathing and meditation. Less is known about the psychological effects of performing yoga postures. The present study investigated the effects of yoga poses on subjective sense of energy and self-esteem. The effects of yoga postures were compared to the effects of 'power poses,' which arguably increase the sense of pow...