Social stances by virtual smiles

When two persons participate to a discussion, they not only exchange about the concepts and ideas they are dis-cussing, but they also express stances with regard to content of their speech (called epistemic stances) and to convey their interpersonal relationship (called interpersonal stances). The stances can be expressed through non-verbal behaviors, for instance smiles. Stances are also co-constructed by their interactants through simultaneous or sequential behaviors such as the alignment of speaker´s and listener´s smiles. In this paper, we present several studies exploring the stances (epistemic, interpersonal, and co-constructed) that the social signal of smile may convey. We propose to analyze different contextual levels to highlight how users´ engagement and discourse context influence their perception of the virtual characters´ stances.