We present automatic systems that implement multimodal social dialogues involving humour with the humanoid robot Nao for the 16th Interspeech conference. Humorous capabilities of the systems are based on three main techniques: riddles, challenging the human participant, and punctual interventions. The presented prototypes will automatically record and analyse audio and video streams to provide ...

It was hypothesized that repeated exposure to humorous material reduces distress, pain, and medication following surgery. This hypothesis was tested in a field experiment by randomly assigning 78 postsurgical patients to either a control group or 1 of 8 experimental groups formed by the factorial crossing of type of videotape (humorous vs. serious), perceived control (choice vs. no choice), and...

Personal humorous remarks may be avoided in certain conversations out of fear of introducing and reinforcing undesirable assumptions. Teases directed at others and self-targeted humor are perhaps the most vulnerable in this regard. Unless participants know each other well, a tease intended as kidding could be heard as an insult, and a self-directed remark could be read as a confession. When hum...

North American (Canadian) and Middle East (Lebanese) participants rated their reactions to four different humorous comments (self-enhancing, affiliative, self-defeating, and aggressive), presented by others in brief scenarios. Consistent with predictions generated from a humor styles model originally formulated in a North American context, all participants responded most negatively to aggressiv...

It has been suggested that intrinsic abilities for regulating emotions remain stable or improve with ageing, but, to date, no studies have examined age-related differences in extrinsic emotion regulation. Since humour has been found to be an effective form of emotion regulation, we used a paradigm similar to that of Strick and colleagues (2009) with two objectives: to compare extrinsic humorous...

Smartness, made possible by intelligent sensors and actuators, is invading our home, office and public environments. This smartness monitors, anticipates and supports our activities, increasing efficiency of our activities. Smartness is usually associated with efficiency, but it also allows environments, virtual humans and social robots to display emotions, empathy and provide environments to i...

BACKGROUND Cataplexy is observed in a subset of patients with narcolepsy and affects approximately 1 in 2,000 persons. Cataplexy is most often triggered by strong emotions such as laughter, which can result in transient, yet debilitating, muscle atonia. The objective of this study was to examine the neural systems underlying humor processing in individuals with cataplexy. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPA...

The Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ; Martin et al., 2003) is one of the most frequently used questionnaires in humor research and has been adapted to several languages. The HSQ measures four humor styles (affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and self-defeating), which should be adaptive or potentially maladaptive to psychosocial well-being. The present study analyzes the internal consistenc...