Laughter as a diagnostic measure of psoriasis severity

Laughter has been studied for its beneficial effects on health and as a therapeutic method to prevent and treat medical conditions. We explore the predictive potential of laughter as a psoriasis severity diagnostic tool. In this study, the dermatologist first examines the patient and registers the PASI and BSA scores. Then patients complete the DLQI and EQ-5D-3L (quality of life), as well as the HADS (anxiety and depression) and the NEO PI-R (personality traits). Finally, the laughs of 30 patients with plaque psoriasis (15 mild cases and 15 moderate to severe cases), and 30 healthy controls will be registered. To do this, patients and accompanying health controls (in pairs), watch a 15-minute video with humorous sketches..

Plausibility of a Neural Network Classifier-Based Neuroprosthesis for Depression Detection via Laughter Records

The present work explores the diagnostic performance for depression of neural network classifiers analyzing the sound structures of laughter as registered from clinical patients and healthy controls. The main methodological novelty of this work is that simple sound variables of laughter are used as inputs, instead of electrophysiological signals or local field potentials (LFPs) or spoken language utterances, which are the usual protocols up-to-date. In the present study, involving 934 laughs from 30 patients and 20 controls, four different neural networks models were tested for sensitivity analysis, and were additionally trained for depression detection. Some elementary sound variables were extracted from the records: timing, fundamental frequency mean, first three formants, average power, and the Shannon-Wiener entropy. In the results obtained, two of the neural networks show a diagnostic discrimination capability of 93.02 and 91.15% respectively, while the third and fourth ones have an 87.96 and 82.40% percentage of success. Remarkably, entropy turns out to be a fundamental variable to distinguish between patients and controls, and this is a significant factor which becomes essential to understand the deep neurocognitive relationships between laughter and depression. In biomedical terms, our neural network classifier-based neuroprosthesis opens up the possibility of applying the same methodology to other mental-health and neuropsychiatric pathologies. Indeed, exploring the application of laughter in the early detection and prognosis of Alzheimer and Parkinson would represent an enticing possibility, both from the biomedical and the computational points of view

The sociotype questionnaire: assessing the social burden of skin diseases

Skin diseases can cause a significant psychosocial burden. A number of studies have considered issues such as a lower quality of life, increased anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation and other psychological disorders. However, adequate means for evaluating social interaction difficulties, diminished social networks, and the impoverished conversational exchanges that affect the wellbeing and mental health of the individual, have not been sufficiently developed. This study is based on the sociotype approach that has recently been proposed as a new theoretical construct implemented in the form of a questionnaire; it examines the social bonding structures and relational factors associated with dermatological conditions..