Capturing Laughter and Smiles under Genuine Amusement vs. Negative Emotion

Cleo Forman, Pablo Thiel, Raymond W. Ptucha, Miguel Domínguez, Cecilia O. Alm

Abstract: Smiling and laughter are typically associated with amusement. If they occur under negative emotions, systems responding naively may confuse an uncomfortable smile or laugh with an amused state. We present a passive text and video elicitation task and collect spontaneous laughter and smiles in reaction to amusing and negative experiences, using standard, ubiquitous sensors (webcam and microphone), along with participant self-ratings. While we rely on a state-of-the-art smile recognizer, for laughter recognition our transfer learning architecture enhanced on modest data outperforms other models with up to 85% accuracy (F1 = 0.86), suggesting this technique as promising for improving affect models. Subsequently, we analyze and automatically predict laughter as amused vs. negative. However, contrasting with prior findings for acted data, for this spontaneously elicited dataset classifying laughter by emotional valence is not satisfactory.