Facial Imitation Improves Emotion Recognition in Adults with Different Levels of Sub-Clinical Autistic Traits.

Andrea Kowallik,Stefan Schweinberger,Maike Pohl

doi:10.3390/jintelligence9010004

Abstract

We used computer-based automatic expression analysis to investigate the impact of imitation on facial emotion recognition with a baseline-intervention-retest design. The participants: 55 young adults with varying degrees of autistic traits, completed an emotion recognition task with images of faces displaying one of six basic emotional expressions. This task was then repeated with instructions to imitate the expressions. During the experiment, a camera captured the participants’ faces for an automatic evaluation of their imitation performance. The instruction to imitate enhanced imitation performance as well as emotion recognition. Of relevance, emotion recognition improvements in the imitation block were larger in people with higher levels of autistic traits, whereas imitation enhancements were independent of autistic traits. The finding that an imitation instruction improves emotion recognition, and that imitation is a positive within-participant predictor of recognition accuracy in the imitation block supports the idea of a link between motor expression and perception in the processing of emotions, which might be mediated by the mirror neuron system. However, because there was no evidence that people with higher autistic traits differ in their imitative behavior per se, their disproportional emotion recognition benefits could have arisen from indirect effects of imitation instructions

Highlights

Humans perceive the meaning of another’s message beyond the spoken word through a range of multimodal cues, such as facial expressions, postures and gestures, and prosody.As such, emotion recognition is one important skill for successful social interactions (Koolagudi and Rao 2012)
We found that both emotion recognition performance and imitation performance could be improved by the simple instruction to imitate
Our results partly replicate the findings by Lewis and Dunn (2017), in the sense that the instruction to imitate increased emotion recognition performance, and that imitationrelated improvements were larger in people with a higher AQ

Summary

Introduction

Humans perceive the meaning of another’s message beyond the spoken word through a range of multimodal cues, such as facial expressions, postures and gestures, and prosody. Emotion recognition is one important skill for successful social interactions (Koolagudi and Rao 2012). The expression and recognition of emotions are subject to individual and cultural variations, basic facial expressions can be recognized across cultures above chance level (cf the meta-analysis by Elfenbein and Ambady 2002). Imitation of facial expressions can already be observed in newborns Beginning with the facial feedback hypothesis by Darwin ([1872] 1965), a lot of research has been conducted on the role of mimicry, or automatic imitation (Chartrand and Lakin 2013), in facial emotion recognition. It has been proposed that, through mimicking an observed emotional expression, the corresponding emotion is generated in the observer, such that the observed person’s emotional state can be inferred from the

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Conclusion