Dynamic emotional expressions do not modulate responses to gestures

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.

The Impact of Response Type on Affordance and Spatial Compatibility Effects in Human and Object Interactions

“…In contrast to the imitative action tendencies revealed in the first experiment, when responses were framed in an interactive context, we found strong social affordance effects in the second experiment. Our findings mainly corroborate previous studies revealing similar effects using dynamic handshake responses (Farmer et al, 2021;Flach et al, 2010) or performing (or imitating) the observed gestures (Faber et al, 2016;Liepelt et al, 2010). Taken together, these results underline the pivotal role of active action representations for eliciting social affordance effects, which help explain the absence of social affordance effects for keypress responses in the first experiment.…”

“…Taken together, these results underline the pivotal role of active action representations for eliciting social affordance effects, which help explain the absence of social affordance effects for keypress responses in the first experiment. Furthermore, by showing social affordance effects using color as the taskrelevant information, we add to the limited number of studies revealing social affordance effects with a variety of task-relevant cues, such as color (Faber et al, 2016), letter cues (Curioni et al, 2020), numerical cues (Farmer et al, 2021;Liepelt et al, 2010), pre-cued gender (Flach et al, 2010), and stimulus distance (Faber et al, 2016). These reports suggest that, unlike for object affordance effects, social affordance effects might be relatively insensitive to the specific task-relevant cue used in a particular study.…”

“…They revealed that although both stimulus types produced strong spatial compatibility effects, the directional compatibility effect, which was in line with social affordances, occurred only for the handshake gestures. It is important to note that the type of response administration might be a critical factor in the emergence of the social affordance effect, since faster complementary hand responses were observed in studies using key release as responses (Faber et al, 2016;Farmer et al, 2021;Flach et al, 2010;Liepelt et al, 2010), whereas the only study that used keypress responses reported the opposite pattern, showing faster responses for the spatially compatible, but affordance-incompatible hand responses (Curioni et al, 2020).…”

The impact of model eyesight and social reward on automatic imitation in virtual reality

“…These studies found that a direct gaze from a model (vs. an averted gaze) not only leads to increased motor activation in the brain during observation of hand movements (Prinsen et al, 2017(Prinsen et al, , 2018Prinsen & Alaerts, 2019) but also more imitation of the model's hand movements (Wang et al, 2011;Wang & Hamilton, 2014). However, recent research, including a well-powered study by Carr et al (2021), could not replicate this effect on imitation (Carr et al, 2021;Farmer et al, 2021). Hence, the evidence for the effect of gaze direction on imitative tendencies is not yet conclusive.…”

“…The first limitation is the low ecological validity of the imitation tasks typically used to study the influence of social factors on imitation. Most research on this topic uses the imitation-inhibition paradigm to measure automatic imitation (Carr et al, 2021;Farmer et al, 2021;Wang et al, 2011;Wang & Hamilton, 2014). In this task, participants respond to symbolic cues with certain hand movements, while a hand in the background performs a congruent movement (identical to the correct response) or an incongruent movement (different from the correct response) (Brass et al, 2000;Cracco, Bardi, et al, 2018).…”