Turn-opening smiles: Facial expression constructing emotional transition in conversation

Abstract

Sometimes in conversation, a participant begins to smile during a silence that occurs between utterances. The purpose of our study was to determine how these smiles contribute to the upcoming turn as well as to the larger conversational context. The results suggest that these smiles can work as a first step in the construction of an emotional transition in conversation. These turn-opening smiles initiate a shift from a neutral or serious emotional stance to a positive or humorous emotional stance. The utterance(s) that follow(s) the smile explicate the grounds for the displayed emotional stance. These utterances also exhibit other (prosodic, lexical or gestural) markers of the emotional stance that the smile initiated. In our data, all the recipients of these stance-introducing smiles reciprocated them. By reciprocating the smile (and other emotional markers), the recipients share the emotional transition that is initiated by the turn-opening smiles. However, the timing of reciprocation varies. For example, sometimes the recipients of the smile reciprocate the emotion display at a point where the smiling participant has explicated the grounds for the transition. In other cases, the reciprocation takes place before such the explication, soon after the first occurrence of the turn-opening smile.