Facial EMG Responses to Emotional Expressions Are Related to Emotion Perception Ability

Abstract

Although most people can identify facial expressions of emotions well, they still differ in this ability. According to embodied simulation theories understanding emotions of others is fostered by involuntarily mimicking the perceived expressions, causing a “reactivation” of the corresponding mental state. Some studies suggest automatic facial mimicry during expression viewing; however, findings on the relationship between mimicry and emotion perception abilities are equivocal. The present study investigated individual differences in emotion perception and its relationship to facial muscle responses - recorded with electromyogram (EMG) - in response to emotional facial expressions. N° = °269 participants completed multiple tasks measuring face and emotion perception. EMG recordings were taken from a subsample (N° = °110) in an independent emotion classification task of short videos displaying six emotions. Confirmatory factor analyses of the m. corrugator supercilii in response to angry, happy, sad, and neutral expressions showed that individual differences in corrugator activity can be separated into a general response to all faces and an emotion-related response. Structural equation modeling revealed a substantial relationship between the emotion-related response and emotion perception ability, providing evidence for the role of facial muscle activation in emotion perception from an individual differences perspective.

Mental imagery of emotions: Electrophysiological evidence

“…Comparable effects have consistently been reported in EMG research (Larsen et al, 2003;Achaibou et al, 2007;Künecke et al, 2014) and may be interpreted in terms of reduced mental effort needed to imagine happy faces, which would be in line to the above mentioned description of the participants that happy faces were easier to imagine.…”

Facial emotion recognition in Parkinson's disease: A review and new hypotheses

“…This is subtended by somatosensory‐related cortices and could be linked to facial mimicry, the tendency to replicate others' facial expressions 128, 129. Hence, in HCs, facial electromyography (EMG) could highlight congruent facial muscle responses to facial expressions, which could foster emotion recognition 130, 131, 132. However, one of the most frequent and distinctive Parkinsonian motor symptoms is hypomimia 1.…”

Are event-related potentials to dynamic facial expressions of emotion related to individual differences in the accuracy of processing facial expressions and identity?

“…In the behavioral part, we assessed individual differences in face cognition abilities in general, and the specific abilities of emotion perception and recognition, using a multivariate test battery consisting of several tasks for each latent variable (Hildebrandt et al, 2015;Wilhelm, Hildebrandt, Manske, Schacht, & Sommer, 2014). In the psychophysiological part, we recorded ERPs while a subsample, randomly selected from the psychometric sample, completed three different tasks: (1) learning and recognition of facial identity (Kaltwasser et al, 2014), (2) the classification of dynamic facial expressions of emotion (Künecke et al, 2014;Recio, Schacht & Sommer, 2014), and (3) the production of facial expressions (Recio, Shmuilovich, & Sommer, 2014). In the present study, we focused on the emotion specificities of the ERPs recorded during the emotion classification task, and on their relationship to the accuracy of face identity and facial emotion processing obtained in the psychometric part.…”

“…For instance, involuntary activation of the corrugator muscle measured while one is seeing dynamic facial expressions correlated with facial emotion perception ability (Künecke, Hildebrandt, Recio, Sommer, & Wilhelm, 2014) and with the experience of negative valence (Sato, Fujimura, Kochiyama, & Suzuki, 2013).…”