Dataset Information

Spontaneous Facial Mimicry Is Enhanced by the Goal of Inferring Emotional States: Evidence for Moderation of "Automatic" Mimicry by Higher Cognitive Processes.

ABSTRACT: A number of studies have shown that individuals often spontaneously mimic the facial expressions of others, a tendency known as facial mimicry. This tendency has generally been considered a reflex-like "automatic" response, but several recent studies have shown that the degree of mimicry may be moderated by contextual information. However, the cognitive and motivational factors underlying the contextual moderation of facial mimicry require further empirical investigation. In this study, we present evidence that the degree to which participants spontaneously mimic a target's facial expressions depends on whether participants are motivated to infer the target's emotional state. In the first study we show that facial mimicry, assessed by facial electromyography, occurs more frequently when participants are specifically instructed to infer a target's emotional state than when given no instruction. In the second study, we replicate this effect using the Facial Action Coding System to show that participants are more likely to mimic facial expressions of emotion when they are asked to infer the target's emotional state, rather than make inferences about a physical trait unrelated to emotion. These results provide convergent evidence that the explicit goal of understanding a target's emotional state affects the degree of facial mimicry shown by the perceiver, suggesting moderation of reflex-like motor activities by higher cognitive processes.

SUBMITTER: Murata A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4824486 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Spontaneous Facial Mimicry Is Enhanced by the Goal of Inferring Emotional States: Evidence for Moderation of "Automatic" Mimicry by Higher Cognitive Processes.

Murata Aiko A Saito Hisamichi H Schug Joanna J Ogawa Kenji K Kameda Tatsuya T

PloS one 20160407 4

A number of studies have shown that individuals often spontaneously mimic the facial expressions of others, a tendency known as facial mimicry. This tendency has generally been considered a reflex-like "automatic" response, but several recent studies have shown that the degree of mimicry may be moderated by contextual information. However, the cognitive and motivational factors underlying the contextual moderation of facial mimicry require further empirical investigation. In this study, we prese ...[more]

PMID: 27055206

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Project description:It is commonly assumed that a person's emotional state can be readily inferred from his or her facial movements, typically called emotional expressions or facial expressions. This assumption influences legal judgments, policy decisions, national security protocols, and educational practices; guides the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric illness, as well as the development of commercial applications; and pervades everyday social interactions as well as research in other scientific fields such as artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and computer vision. In this article, we survey examples of this widespread assumption, which we refer to as the common view, and we then examine the scientific evidence that tests this view, focusing on the six most popular emotion categories used by consumers of emotion research: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. The available scientific evidence suggests that people do sometimes smile when happy, frown when sad, scowl when angry, and so on, as proposed by the common view, more than what would be expected by chance. Yet how people communicate anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise varies substantially across cultures, situations, and even across people within a single situation. Furthermore, similar configurations of facial movements variably express instances of more than one emotion category. In fact, a given configuration of facial movements, such as a scowl, often communicates something other than an emotional state. Scientists agree that facial movements convey a range of information and are important for social communication, emotional or otherwise. But our review suggests an urgent need for research that examines how people actually move their faces to express emotions and other social information in the variety of contexts that make up everyday life, as well as careful study of the mechanisms by which people perceive instances of emotion in one another. We make specific research recommendations that will yield a more valid picture of how people move their faces to express emotions and how they infer emotional meaning from facial movements in situations of everyday life. This research is crucial to provide consumers of emotion research with the translational information they require.

Dataset Information

Spontaneous Facial Mimicry Is Enhanced by the Goal of Inferring Emotional States: Evidence for Moderation of "Automatic" Mimicry by Higher Cognitive Processes.

Publications

Spontaneous Facial Mimicry Is Enhanced by the Goal of Inferring Emotional States: Evidence for Moderation of "Automatic" Mimicry by Higher Cognitive Processes.

Similar Datasets

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