Positive and Negative emotional states behind the laugh in spontaneous spoken dialogs” submitted to the workshop The phonetics of Laughter

Abstract

This paper deals with a study of laughs in spontaneous speech. We explore the positive and negative valence of laughter in the global aim of the detection of emotional behaviour in speech. It is particularly useful to illustrate the auditory perception of the acoustic features of laughter where its facial expression (smile type) is not visible. A perceptive test has shown that subjects are able to make the distinction between a positive and a negative laugh in our spontaneous corpus. A first conclusion of the acoustic analysis is that unvoiced laughs are more perceived as negative and voiced segments as positive, which is not surprising. 1