Emotional Empathy and Facial Mimicry for Static and Dynamic Facial Expressions of Fear and Disgust.

Krystyna Rymarczyk,Łukasz Żurawski,Iwona Szatkowska,Kamila Jankowiak-Siuda

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01853

Abstract

Facial mimicry is the tendency to imitate the emotional facial expressions of others. Increasing evidence suggests that the perception of dynamic displays leads to enhanced facial mimicry, especially for happiness and anger. However, little is known about the impact of dynamic stimuli on facial mimicry for fear and disgust. To investigate this issue, facial EMG responses were recorded in the corrugator supercilii, levator labii, and lateral frontalis muscles, while participants viewed static (photos) and dynamic (videos) facial emotional expressions. Moreover, we tested whether emotional empathy modulated facial mimicry for emotional facial expressions. In accordance with our predictions, the highly empathic group responded with larger activity in the corrugator supercilii and levator labii muscles. Moreover, dynamic compared to static facial expressions of fear revealed enhanced mimicry in the high-empathic group in the frontalis and corrugator supercilii muscles. In the low-empathic group the facial reactions were not differentiated between fear and disgust for both dynamic and static facial expressions. We conclude that highly empathic subjects are more sensitive in their facial reactions to the facial expressions of fear and disgust compared to low empathetic counterparts. Our data confirms that personal characteristics, i.e., empathy traits as well as modality of the presented stimuli, modulate the strength of facial mimicry. In addition, measures of EMG activity of the levator labii and frontalis muscles may be a useful index of empathic responses of fear and disgust.

Highlights

The term facial mimicry (FM) describes the automatic (Dimberg and Thunberg, 1998) and unintentional imitation of emotional expressions in human faces
Significant interactions of emotion × modality [F(1,30) = 4.353, p = 0.046, η2 = 0.127] and emotion x modality × emotional empathy groups [F(1,30) = 4.978, p = 0.033, η2 = 0.142] were found. The latter interaction showed that: (1) high empathy (HE) compared with low empathy (LE) people reacted with stronger corrugator supercilii muscle (CS) response for dynamic and static disgust as well as for dynamic and static fear facial expressions; (2) HE subjects reacted with stronger CS for static disgust compared to static fear; (3) HE subjects reacted with higher EMG activity for dynamic than static fear expressions; (4) HE subjects reacted with higher EMG activity for static than dynamic disgust expressions
Interaction of emotional empathy groups × emotion × modality showed: (1) HE compared with LE people reacted with stronger lateral frontalis (LF) response for dynamic fear; (2) HE subjects reacted with stronger LF response for dynamic fear compared to dynamic disgust and with stronger LF activity for static fear compared to static disgust; (3) HE subjects reacted with higher EMG activity for dynamic than static fear expressions

Summary

Introduction

The term facial mimicry (FM) describes the automatic (Dimberg and Thunberg, 1998) and unintentional imitation of emotional expressions in human faces. Some studies have reported stronger emotionspecific responses to dynamic as opposed to static expressions, mainly the zygomaticus major muscle (ZM) (Weyers et al, 2006; Rymarczyk et al, 2011) and the corrugator supercilii muscle (CS) for happiness and anger (Sato et al, 2008), respectively; the available data is not consistent (for review see Seibt et al, 2015). This may be associated with the different methodologies that were used, e.g., different kinds of stimuli used across studies. These regions are considered to be part of the extended mirror neuron system (MNS) (van der Gaag et al, 2007; Likowski et al, 2012), a neuronal network linked to empathy (Jabbi and Keysers, 2008; Decety, 2010a; Decety et al, 2014)

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Conclusion