Smiles and laughs have drawn a lot of interest from researchers of different backgrounds and perspectives, especially in the past couple of decades, thus providing the community with a deeper understanding of the highly important roles smiles and laughs play in our daily interactions. These studies also showed the limitations and difficulties that come with processing and analysing them.
Building on previous work, established communities and multidisciplinary research projects, the main goal of this workshop is to highlight the current research on smiling and laughter in general and from all disciplines, but also to particularly encourage work on these areas which we observe to be relatively understudied despite being of great interest under many perspectives. Especially we would like to encourage the sharing of methods and resources to tackle these “slippery” and sometimes hard to tackle communicative behaviours.
With that mindset, we invite the sharing of perspectives between computer scientists, linguists, engineers, and psychologists contributing to push further the state-of-the-art. Especially with respect to the goal of this workshop, we encourage:
- Work on smiling and laughter in adult-adult interactions, but also adult-child, child-child and human-agent interactions. This in neuro-typical but also in neuro-different and clinical populations in the most varied contexts.
- Work aimed at exploring the relationship between laughter, smiling and other modalities (e.g. speech, gaze, gestures etc.) to convey meaning in interaction and manage conversations.
- Work aimed at deepening our understanding of the smiling/laughter relationship (between each other or on each other, on the subjects themselves or their interlocutors), having insight on whether and (eventually) when it can be considered scalar or not.
- Work with a focus on the smiling and laughter intensity / arousal levels dimension.
- Work focussing on the cognitive processes behind the perception and production of smiling and laughter in themselves or in interaction with linguistic material and other modalities.