A Novel Method Testing the Ability to Imitate Composite Emotional Expressions Reveals an Association with Empathy

Justin H G Williams,David I Perrett,Haro De Grauw,Andrew T A Nicolson,Katie J Clephan,Marcel Brass

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0061941

Justin H G Williams, David I Perrett + Show 4 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0061941

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Abstract

Social communication relies on intentional control of emotional expression. Its variability across cultures suggests important roles for imitation in developing control over enactment of subtly different facial expressions and therefore skills in emotional communication. Both empathy and the imitation of an emotionally communicative expression may rely on a capacity to share both the experience of an emotion and the intention or motor plan associated with its expression. Therefore, we predicted that facial imitation ability would correlate with empathic traits. We built arrays of visual stimuli by systematically blending three basic emotional expressions in controlled proportions. Raters then assessed accuracy of imitation by reconstructing the same arrays using photographs of participants’ attempts at imitations of the stimuli. Accuracy was measured as the mean proximity of the participant photographs to the target stimuli in the array. Levels of performance were high, and rating was highly reliable. More empathic participants, as measured by the empathy quotient (EQ), were better facial imitators and, in particular, performed better on the more complex, blended stimuli. This preliminary study offers a simple method for the measurement of facial imitation accuracy and supports the hypothesis that empathic functioning may utilise motor control mechanisms which are also used for emotional expression.

Highlights

Facial emotional expression was considered by Darwin [1] to be universally constant and largely innate
We developed a novel method for measuring facial imitation that relies on the imitators’ capacity to make their expressions distinct from the other expressions in the set to be copied
Participants showed clear evidence of their ability to accurately imitate a range of emotional expressions, obtaining error scores that were significantly lower than chance level

Summary

Introduction

Facial emotional expression was considered by Darwin [1] to be universally constant and largely innate. Facial imitation may draw upon similar mechanisms to those serving empathy, which is concerned with both the communication of emotion and a secondary representation of that emotion which enables understanding [13] This argument is closely tied to the simulation model of empathy, which suggests that the empathiser may use his or her neural systems for imitating actions ‘off-line’ to imagine and understand the experiences of others [14,15], and the PerceptionAction model of empathy [16], which argues that empathy relies upon the perception-action coupling mechanisms that we consider necessary for imitation. These cognitive models of empathy propose reliance on the ‘mirror neuron’ system [14,17,18] which is thought to be important for imitation [19]

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