Every smile you fake, I’ll be watching you. Visual cues, affective stance, and irony.

Irony mutes the aggressiveness of criticisms, and tinges compliments with unfriendliness. In this work we first aimed to investigate whether interlocutors are sensitive to the ironists’ affective stance conveyed through visual cues. We asked 103 raters to evaluate the friendliness of a series of sincere/ironic praises/blames presented as videos from which audio has been removed. We then addressed the question of whether interlocutors rely on the perceived ‘jocularity’ of speakers to attribute them an ironic intent. We re-analyzed previously published data from a study on the recognition of irony based on visual cues, verifying whether the newly collected friendliness ratings might predict accuracy. Results confirmed the hypothesis that when presented with pairs of sincere/ironic videos, participants tend to attribute irony to the friendlier video of the pair.