Laughter Animation Generation

International audienceLaughter is an important communicative signal in human-human communication. It involves the whole body, from lip motion, facial expression, to rhythmic body and shoulder movement. Laughter is an important social signal in human-human interaction and may convey a wide range of meanings (extreme happiness, social bounding, politeness, irony,). To enhance human-machine interactions, efforts have been made to endow embodied conversational agents, ECAs, with laughing capabilities. Recently, motion capture technologies have been applied to record laughter behaviors including facial expressions and body movements. It allows investigating the temporal relationship of laughter behaviors in details. Based on the available data, researchers have made efforts to develop automatic generation models of laughter animations. These models control the multimodal behaviors of ECAs including lip motions, upper facial expressions, head rotations, shoulder shaking, and torso movements. The underlying idea of these works is to propose a statistical framework able to automatically capture the correlation between laughter audio and multimodal behaviors. In the synthesis phase, the captured correlation is rendered into synthesized animations according to laughter audio given in input. This chapter reviews existing works on automatic generation of laughter animation

The purpose and function of humour in health, healthcare and nursing: a literature review

This paper is a report of a review conducted to identify, critically analyse and synthesize the humour literature across a number of fields related to health, health care and nursing. The humour-health hypothesis suggests that there is a positive link between humour and health. Humour has been a focus of much contention and deliberation for centuries, with three theories dominating the field: the superiority or tendentious theory, the incongruity theory and the relief theory. A total of 1630 papers were identified, with 220 fully sourced and 88 included in the final review. There is a dearth of humour research within nursing yet, ironically, an abundance of non-evidence-based opinion citing prerequisites and exclusion zones. Examination of physician-patient interaction and the humour-health hypothesis demonstrates that use of humour by patients is both challenging and revealing, particularly with regard to self-deprecating humour

Process and outcome in communication of genetic information within families: a systematic review

The communication of risk is a central activity in clinical genetics, with genetic health professionals encouraging the dissemination of relevant information by individuals to their at-risk family members. To understand the process by which communication occurs as well as its outcomes, a systematic review of actual communication in families about genetic risk was conducted. Findings from 29 papers meeting the inclusion criteria were summarised and are presented narratively. Family communication about genetic risk is described as a deliberative process, in which: sense is made of personal risk; the vulnerability and receptivity of the family member is assessed; decisions are made about what will be conveyed; and the right time to disclose is selected. The communication strategy adopted will depend on these factors and varies within families as well as between families. Inherent in these processes are conflicting senses of responsibility: to provide potentially valuable information and to prevent harm that may arise from this knowledge. However, the research 'outcomes' of communication have been professionally determined (number of relatives reported as informed, uptake of testing, knowledge of the recipient) and are typically unrelated to the concerns of the family member. The impact of communication on the individual, family members, and family relationships is of concern to the individual conveying the information, but this is largely self-reported. Currently, there is insufficient information to inform the development of theoretically and empirically based practice to foster 'good' communication. The implications for future research are discussed