Publication

🏆 Steal and smile: Impact of emotion regulation and social values on smiles in social conflicts

*Mirella Hladký, Bin Han, Jonathan Gratch, Patrick Gebhard, Tanja Schneeberger (*work conducted outside of our group)

ACII2025 (Best Paper Award) · 2025

@inproceedings{hladký2025,
  title     = {🏆 Steal and smile: Impact of emotion regulation and social values on smiles in social conflicts},
  author    = {*Mirella Hladký and Bin Han and Jonathan Gratch and Patrick Gebhard and Tanja Schneeberger (*work conducted outside of our group)},
  booktitle = {ACII2025 (Best Paper Award)},
  year      = {2025},
}

Abstract

Emotion recognition models primarily rely on observable expressions. However, expressions may be shaped by individual traits such as emotion regulation strategies and social versus self-focused orientation, particularly in social conflicts. This incongruence between emotional experience and expression can lead to misinterpretations, for example, in the case of smiles. We provide detailed annotations of an existing corpus of 300 smiles derived from recordings of 132 participants in 431 social conflict situations, present a novel computational model that predicts these expressive reactions from the nature of the conflict and individual traits, and use explainable AI methods to uncover insights. The results highlight the strong impact of individual traits and offer insights into the intricate relationships between internally experienced and externally displayed emotions. This work contributes to a deeper understanding of human emotions, and have implications for the development of more accurate emotion recognition systems.