Search papers, labs, and topics across Lattice.
This study analyzes the smiling behavior of 978 Holocaust survivors during video testimonies, employing an automatic smile detection model that achieves an F1 score of 85%. The researchers find that smiling is significantly correlated with specific narrative structures and emotional valence, often occurring during intense negative affect, which in turn enhances the emotional trajectory of surrounding discourse. The findings suggest that smiling serves a vital function in emotional regulation and social interaction amidst traumatic recollection, influencing both physiological responses and narrative dynamics.
Smiling during traumatic recollection not only occurs in moments of distress but actively enhances emotional recovery and narrative coherence.
We study when, where, and why 978 Holocaust survivors smile in video testimonies. We create an automatic smile detection model from facial features with an F1 of 85% and annotate detected smiles under two established taxonomies of smiling. We produce narrative features on 1,083,417 transcript sentences as well as emotional valence from three different modalities: audio, eye gaze, and text transcript. Smiling rates are significantly correlated with specific semantic topics, narrative structures, and temporal syntaxes across the entire corpus. Smiles often occur during periods of intense negative affect; these negative-affect smiles improve the valence trajectory of surrounding sentences significantly across all three modalities. Smiling reduces eye dynamics and blink rates, and the strength of both of these effects is also modulated by narrative valence. Taken together, we conclude that smiling plays a critical role in regulating emotion and social interaction during traumatic recollection.
