We have a new article out in PNAS! We asked participants to take part in a speed-dating experiment, while we aligned (😊 vs 😊) or misaligned (😊 vs 😕) their smiles in real-time with our face transformation algorithms. While participants remained unaware of the manipulations, aligned smiles enhanced their romantic attraction, compared to unaligned scenarios. Therefore, we causally manipulated the emergence of romantic attraction in free social interactions. This demonstrates the potential of our experimental platform DuckSoup, supports alignment theories and raises important ethical questions about transformation filters! A titanseque effort that we are delighted to publish in PNAS! Check this twitter thread or the manuscript for more information.

We are releasing in open-source our gStreamer plugin Mozza, which enables users to parametrically transform the facial smiles in a video feed either in real-time or offline. The open source code is here. This is an implementation of Arias 2018 IEEE TACs.

We are releasing a public beta of our new experimental platform DuckSoup 🗓. DuckSoup is an open source videoconference platform enabling researchers to manipulate participants' facial and vocal attributes in real time during social interactions. If you are interested in collecting large, synchronised & multicultural human social interaction data sets, get in touch! Check out a project description here 🧞‍♂️ and the open source code here 🧑🏽‍💻.

New article out in Scientific reports! 😍 We investigated if pupillary reactions 👀 can index the processes underlying the audiovisual integration of emotional signals (😊😱😮). We used our audiovisual smiles algorithms to create congruent/incongruent audiovisual smiles and studied pupillary reactions to manipulated stimuli. We show that pupil dilation can reflect emotional information mismatch in audiovisual speech. We hope to replicate these findings in neurodivergent populations to probe their emotional processing. Check the full article here. Or check this twitter thread explaining the findings.

New article out in Interspeech! 🗣️ We analysed a large multispeaker dataset of vocal utterances and characterised the acoustic strategies used by speakers to communicate social attitudes using deep alignment methods. We produced high-level representations of speakers’ articulation (e.g. Vowel Space Density) and speech rhythm. We hope to use these measures to provide an objective validation method of deep voice conversions methods. Check the full article here.

We have a new article out in Current Biology! We show that congenitally blind individuals facially imitate smiles heard in speech despite having never seen a facial expression. This demonstrates that the development of facial mimicry does not depend on visual learning and that imitation is not a mere visuo-motor process but a flexible mechanism deployed across sensory inputs. Check the full article here. Or check this twitter thread explaining the findings.

We have a new article out in Emotion Review! In this article we present the methodological advantages of using stimulus manipulation techniques for the experimental study of emotions. We give several examples using such computational models to uncover cognitive mechanisms, and argue that such stimulus manipulation techniques can allow researchers to make causal inferences between stimulus features and participant's behavioral, physiological and neural responses.

We have a new article out in Current Biology 🥳 !! In this article we modeled the auditory consequences of smiles in speech and showed that such auditory smiles can trigger facial imitation in listeners even in the absence of visual cues. Interestingly, these reactions occur even when participants do not explicitly detect the smiles.

New article out in JASA-EL! We uncovered the spectral cues underlying the perceptual processing of smiles in speech using reverse correlation. The analyses revealed that listeners rely on robust spectral representations that specifically encode vowel’s formants. These findings demonstrate the causal role played by formants in the perception of smiles and present a novel method to estimate the spectral bases of high-level (e.g., emotional/social/paralinguistic) speech representations.