Abstract
According to embodied cognition accounts, viewing others’ facial emotion can elicit the respective emotion representation in observers which entails simulations of sensory, motor, and contextual experiences. In line with that, published research found viewing others’ facial emotion to elicit automatic matched facial muscle activation, which was further found to facilitate emotion recognition. Perhaps making congruent facial muscle activity explicit produces an even greater recognition advantage. If there is conflicting sensory information, i.e., incongruent facial muscle activity, this might impede recognition. The effects of actively manipulating facial muscle activity on facial emotion recognition from videos were investigated across three experimental conditions: (a) explicit imitation of viewed facial emotional expressions (stimulus-congruent condition), (b) pen-holding with the lips (stimulus-incongruent condition), and (c) passive viewing (control condition). It was hypothesised that (1) experimental condition (a) and (b) result in greater facial muscle activity than (c), (2) experimental condition (a) increases emotion recognition accuracy from others’ faces compared to (c), (3) experimental condition (b) lowers recognition accuracy for expressions with a salient facial feature in the lower, but not the upper face area, compared to (c). Participants (42 males, 42 females) underwent a facial emotion recognition experiment (ADFES-BIV) while electromyography (EMG) was recorded from five facial muscle sites. The experimental conditions’ order was counter-balanced. Pen-holding caused stimulus-incongruent facial muscle activity for expressions with facial feature saliency in the lower face region, which reduced recognition of lower face region emotions. Explicit imitation caused stimulus-congruent facial muscle activity without modulating recognition. Methodological implications are discussed.
Highlights
Embodied cognition accounts postulate that there are interrelations between bodily actions and cognitions
Explicit imitation did not lead to a significant advantage over the free facial movement condition. These results suggest that suppression of facial muscle activation in observers diminishes facial emotion recognition rather than that explicit imitation enhances recognition
Such biases could affect results for any within-subject analyses. It was not foreseeable before data collection that the instruction to explicitly imitate facial emotional expressions would have longlasting effects on some participants in that they carried over the explicit imitation to subsequent conditions
Summary
Embodied cognition accounts postulate that there are interrelations between bodily actions (e.g., body posture, gestures) and cognitions. Observing a smile can activate a representation of a situation that contained smiling (e.g., receiving positive news) This representation can include both the accompanying affect (e.g., feeling happy) and its physical components, including physiological responses and facial muscle activations. In support of this idea, observing facial emotional expressions within a laboratory setting has been found to lead to congruency between observers’ and observed facial muscle activation (e.g., Dimberg, 1982; Dimberg and Thunberg, 1998; Dimberg et al, 2000; Hess and Blairy, 2001; Sato and Yoshikawa, 2007; Achaibou et al, 2008; Likowski et al, 2012). Based on embodied cognition accounts, the representation of the emotional expression produced in the observer should facilitate facial emotion recognition of the observed expression due to the stimulus-congruency in facial muscle activations
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