Smiling Regulates Emotion During Traumatic Recollection

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 associated with specific semantic topics, narrative structures, and temporal syntaxes across the corpus. Smiles often occur during periods of intense negative affect and we find negative-affect smiles are associated with more positive subsequent valence trajectories across all three modalities. Smiling reduces eye dynamics and blink rates, with both of these effects modulated by narrative valence. Taken together, we conclude that smiling plays a critical role in regulating emotion and social interaction during traumatic recollection.

Updated for camera-ready acceptance into ICMI 2026