Are you friendly or just polite? - analysis of smiles in spontaneous face-to-face interactions

Abstract

This work is part of a research effort to understand and characterize the morphological and dynamic features of polite and amused smiles. We analyzed a dataset consisting of young adults (n=61), interested in learning about banking services, who met with a professional banker face-to-face in a conference room while both participants’ faces were unobtrusively recorded. We analyzed 258 instances of amused and polite smiles from this dataset, noting also if they were shared, which we defined as if the rise of one starts before the decay of another. Our analysis confirms previous findings showing longer durations of amused smiles while also suggesting new findings about symmetry of the smile dynamics. We found more symmetry in the velocities of the rise and decay of the amused smiles, and less symmetry in the polite smiles. We also found fastest decay velocity for polite but shared smiles.