Abstract
Facial mimicry is commonly defined as the tendency to imitate—at a sub-threshold level—facial expressions of other individuals. Numerous studies support a role of facial mimicry in recognizing others’ emotions. However, the underlying functional mechanism is unclear. A prominent hypothesis considers facial mimicry as based on an action-perception loop, leading to the prediction that facial mimicry should be observed only when processing others’ facial expressions. Nevertheless, previous studies have also detected facial mimicry during observation of emotional bodily expressions. An emergent alternative hypothesis is that facial mimicry overtly reflects the simulation of an “emotion”, rather than the reproduction of a specific observed motor pattern. In the present study, we tested whether blocking mimicry (“Bite”) on the lower face disrupted recognition of happy expressions conveyed by either facial or body expressions. In Experiment 1, we tested participants’ ability to identify happy, fearful and neutral expressions in the Bite condition and in two control conditions. In Experiment 2, to ensure that such a manipulation selectively affects emotion recognition, we tested participants’ ability to recognize emotional expressions, as well as the actors’ gender, under the Bite condition and a control condition. Finally, we investigated the relationship between dispositional empathy and emotion recognition under the condition of blocked mimicry. Our findings demonstrated that blocking mimicry on the lower face hindered recognition of happy facial and body expressions, while the recognition of neutral and fearful expressions was not affected by the mimicry manipulation. The mimicry manipulation did not affect the gender discrimination task. Furthermore, the impairment of happy expression recognition correlated with empathic traits. These results support the role of facial mimicry in emotion recognition and suggest that facial mimicry reflects a global sensorimotor simulation of others’ emotions rather than a muscle-specific reproduction of an observed motor expression.
Highlights
Humans often unconsciously and unintentionally imitate or mimic others’ postures, prosody and facial expressions (e.g., [1])
The Medium x Facial Manipulation x Expression ANOVA carried out on accuracy data showed a significant main effect of the factor Medium (F1,23 = 16.27; p < 0.001; ηp2 = 0.41), indicating that participants discriminated emotional expressions with greater accuracy when emotions were conveyed by facial expressions rather than by body expressions (87 ± 9%)
Recognition of happy expressions was worse in the Bite condition (85.7 ± 10%) than in the Rest (88.0 ± 10%; p = 0.03; Cohen’s d = 0.55) and Lip conditions (87.4 ± 11%; p = 0.051; Cohen’s d = 0.30), which in turn did not differ from one another (p = 0.52)
Summary
Humans often unconsciously and unintentionally imitate or mimic others’ postures, prosody and facial expressions (e.g., [1]). Facial mimicry is the tendency to subtly imitate others’ facial expressions, and has been a subject of great interest among scholars during the last twenty years [2,3,4,5,6]. In most cases, undetectable to the human eye, and sensitive techniques are required to quantify facial muscle contractions. When electromyography (EMG) is used, these reactions are generally observed as congruent muscle responses to the observed facial expressions within one second after exposure [7,8,9]. The main aim of the present study was to investigate the causal involvement of facial mimicry in the recognition of facial and body emotional expressions. As detailed in the following paragraphs, such evidence would more clearly define the mechanisms underlying facial mimicry and its role in emotion recognition
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