Mirroring Facial Expressions and Emotions in Dyadic Conversations

Costanza Navarretta


Abstract
This paper presents an investigation of mirroring facial expressions and the emotions which they convey in dyadic naturally occurring first encounters. Mirroring facial expressions are a common phenomenon in face-to-face interactions, and they are due to the mirror neuron system which has been found in both animals and humans. Researchers have proposed that the mirror neuron system is an important component behind many cognitive processes such as action learning and understanding the emotions of others. Preceding studies of the first encounters have shown that overlapping speech and overlapping facial expressions are very frequent. In this study, we want to determine whether the overlapping facial expressions are mirrored or are otherwise correlated in the encounters, and to what extent mirroring facial expressions convey the same emotion. The results of our study show that the majority of smiles and laughs, and one fifth of the occurrences of raised eyebrows are mirrored in the data. Moreover some facial traits in co-occurring expressions co-occur more often than it would be expected by chance. Finally, amusement, and to a lesser extent friendliness, are often emotions shared by both participants, while other emotions indicating individual affective states such as uncertainty and hesitancy are never showed by both participants, but co-occur with complementary emotions such as friendliness and support. Whether these tendencies are specific to this type of conversations or are more common should be investigated further.
Anthology ID:
L16-1075
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Marko Grobelnik, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
469–474
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1075
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Costanza Navarretta. 2016. Mirroring Facial Expressions and Emotions in Dyadic Conversations. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 469–474, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Mirroring Facial Expressions and Emotions in Dyadic Conversations (Navarretta, LREC 2016)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1075.pdf