Abstract
The tendency to imitate the actions of others appears to be a fundamental aspect of human social interaction. Emotional expressions are a particularly salient form of social stimuli (Vuilleumier & Schwartz, 2001) but their relationship to imitative behaviour is currently unclear. In this paper we report the results of five studies which investigated the effect of a target's dynamic emotional stimuli on participants' tendency to respond compatibly to the target's actions. Experiment one examined the effect of dynamic emotional expressions on the automatic imitation of opening and closing hand movements. Experiment two used the same basic paradigm but added gaze direction as an additional factor. Experiment three investigated the effect of dynamic emotional expressions on compatibility responses to handshakes. Experiment four investigated whether dynamic emotional expressions modulated response to valenced social gestures. Finally, experiment five compared the effects of dynamic and static emotional expressions on participants' automatic imitation of finger lifting. Across all five studies we reliably elicited a compatibility effect however, none of the studies found a significant modulating effect of emotional expression. This null effect was also supported by a random effects meta-analysis and a series of Bayesian t-tests. Nevertheless, these results must be caveated by the fact that our studies had limited power to detect effect sizes below d = 0.4. We conclude by situating our findings within the literature, suggesting that the effect of emotional expressions on automatic imitation is, at best, minimal.
Highlights
The tendency to imitate the actions of others appears to be a fundamental aspect of human social interaction
Previous research has demonstrated that variance in overall mean reaction times (RTs) is a major predictor of the compatibility effect (Butler, Ward, & Ramsey, 2015), RTs for each condition were converted into percentage congruence effects (PCongEs) using the following equation taken from Forbes et al (2016): MeanIncongruentRT − MeanCongruentRT
Consistent with the findings of the pre vious experiments, we found a significant effect of congruency in the mean RTs but did not find any significant effect of the type of emotional expression observed on PCongEs
Summary
The tendency to imitate the actions of others appears to be a fundamental aspect of human social interaction. One recent study found no correlation between the two forms of imitation (Genschow et al, 2017) and a neuroimaging study suggested they depend on dissociable neural systems (Hogeveen et al, 2014) while a developmental study suggested a link between AI and experience of behavioural synchrony (O’Sullivan, Bijvoet-van den Berg, & Caldwell, 2018) Despite this uncertainty a recent meta-analysis (Cracco et al, 2018) found strong evidence that AI is a robust and largely automatic process that can be modulated by a range of factors including: action goals; how closely the stimuli physically resemble a human and the extent to which the gender of the actor and the outcome of the observed action overlapped with the gender of the imitator and the outcome of the executed action. Experiment five compared the ef fect of our dynamic emotional expression stimuli with the static images used in previous studies investigating emotional expressions and AI in the context of finger lifting
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