Smiling Regulates Emotion During Traumatic Recollection

TL;DR

This study investigates the role of smiling in emotion regulation among Holocaust survivors during traumatic recollections, using automated smile detection and multimodal analysis.

Contribution

It introduces an automatic smile detection model and analyzes multimodal data to reveal how smiling correlates with emotional and narrative features in trauma testimonies.

Findings

Smiling rates correlate with specific semantic topics and narrative structures.

Smiles often occur during intense negative affect and improve emotional valence trajectories.

Smiling reduces eye movements and blink rates, modulated by narrative valence.

Abstract

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.