Facial mimicry in its social setting

Abstract

In interpersonal encounters, individuals often exhibit changes in their own facial expressions in response to emotional expressions of another person. Such changes are often called facial mimicry. While this tendency first appeared to be an automatic tendency of the perceiver to show the same emotional expression as the sender, evidence is now accumulating that situation, person, and relationship jointly determine whether and for which emotions such congruent facial behavior is shown. We review the evidence regarding the moderating influence of such factors on facial mimicry with a focus on understanding the meaning of facial responses to emotional expressions in a particular constellation. From this, we derive recommendations for a research agenda with a stronger focus on the most common forms of encounters, actual interactions with known others, and on assessing potential mediators of facial mimicry. We conclude that facial mimicry is modulated by many factors: attention deployment and sensitivity, detection of valence, emotional feelings, and social motivations. We posit that these are the more proximal causes of changes in facial mimicry due to changes in its social setting.

Emotional Empathy and Facial Mimicry for Static and Dynamic Facial Expressions of Fear and Disgust

“…An increasing number of the studies have argued that FM may be dependent on many particular factors (for review see Hess and Fischer, 2013; Seibt et al, 2015), including the type of task the participant is engaged in Korb et al (2010) and Murata et al (2016), properties of the stimulus (dynamic vs. static presentation) (Weyers et al, 2006; Sato et al, 2008; Rymarczyk et al, 2011, 2016) and personal characteristics of the perceiver (e.g., empathic traits) (Sonnby-Borgström et al, 2003; Dimberg et al, 2011; Balconi and Canavesio, 2016). Recently, it has been shown that hormonal level, i.e., administration of oxytocin (Korb et al, 2016) as well as cultural norms (Wood et al, 2016) influence FM expression.…”

“…There is considerable evidence that dynamic information is beneficial for various aspects of face processing, e.g., emotion recognition or judgments of intensity and arousal (for review see Krumhuber et al, 2013). Moreover, some studies have reported stronger emotion-specific responses to dynamic as opposed to static expressions, mainly the zygomaticus major muscle (ZM) (Weyers et al, 2006; Rymarczyk et al, 2011) and the corrugator supercilii muscle (CS) for happiness and anger (Sato et al, 2008), respectively; however, the available data is not consistent (for review see Seibt et al, 2015). This may be associated with the different methodologies that were used, e.g., different kinds of stimuli used across studies.…”

“…It appears that apart from CS (Balconi and Canavesio, 2013) and OO (Wolf et al, 2005), levator labii (LL) which creates wrinkles on both sides of the nose, is indexed for “disgust mimicry” (Vrana, 1993; Lundquist and Dimberg, 1995; Cacioppo et al, 2007). The activity of LL during the mimicry of disgusted facial expressions has been reported only in a few studies (for review see Seibt et al, 2015). …”

Seniors’ Sensing of Agents’ Personality from Facial Expressions

“…Several research studies have shown that emotions and facial emotional expressions play an important role in everyday life [7,11,12]. Indeed, there is a wide field of research dealing with questions concerning emotional facial expressions as a signal that mediates social interaction.…”

Social Context Modulates Facial Imitation of Children’s Emotional Expressions

“…Research investigating interpersonal interaction of emotional facial expressions, mostly using electromyography (EMG), has demonstrated such communication to be rapid, automatic, and largely unconscious [9, 10]. Overall, observing emotional facial expressions in others elicits motor activation involved in the production of the expression observed [10].…”