How do you decide whether the emotion expressed on another person’s face is positive or negative? Emotions may be perceived via two routes. The longer (slower) route involves matching visual input with stored knowledge about emotions. The shorter (faster) route involves empathic emotions that serve as proprioceptive cues in emotion recognition. In line with embodiedcognition theory (Barsalou, Niedenthal, Barbey, & Ruppert, 2003), we propose that mimicry may result in faster emotion recognition because it facilitates use of the shorter route. To test this idea, we studied the effect of constraining mimicry on speed of emotion recognition. Consistent with the present view, perceivers spontaneously mimic facial expressions of emotions (Dimberg, 1990), and their own experienced emotions are affected accordingly (Stel, Van Baaren, & Vonk, in press). Freezing the face reduces the experience of emotional empathy (Stel et al., in press). Blairy, Herrera, and Hess (1999) failed to demonstrate a link between mimicry and accuracy of emotion recognition. However, we propose that mimicry facilitates the short route of one’s access to others’ emotions, which means that mimicry should affect speed, but not accuracy, of emotion recognition. We hypothesized that participants will recognize a briefly exposed facial expression of emotion more slowly when they are unable to mimic facial expressions than when they are free to mimic the expression. Moreover, we expect this effect to be more pronounced for women than for men: Women are more facially expressive than are men (LaFrance & Hecht, 2000), and facial feedback may be more important in emotion-related processing for women than it is for men. METHOD