Mimicking the emotional expressions of others : Are all expressive features made equal?

Dennis Küster, Stephan Verschoor, Tanja Schultz & Bernhard Hommel

What determines whether and how much we mimic others? The Theory of Event Coding (TEC) proposes that the amount of mimicry in dyadic interaction increases with the degree of perceptual-feature overlap: For TEC, all expressions are ultimately perceptual-features and equal, provided they receive equal attention. In contrast, the Emotional Mimicry in Context (EMC) view suggests that the social signal value of the to-be mimicked target behavior, can moderate mimicry. All else being equal, from an EMC view, the affiliative nature of expressions should thus elicit differential mimicry.

We present four online Me-Other Overlap Tasks (MOOT, N = 256) featuring real-time interaction with avatars to manipulate behavioral similarity (synchronous, asynchronous) and additionally we manipulate the attention on the relation between avatar and participant. In the mimicry phase, the avatars produce three expressions (affiliative smile, counter-affiliative frown, neutral head-roll). In line with both TEC and EMC, we find overall mimicry of all three expressive features. However, and only supporting TEC, mimicry of all three expressions is driven by experimentally induced behavioral similarity. This means that our finding suggests that irrespective of affiliative nature of the to-be mimicked expression, more perceptual-feature overlap results in more mimicry

We discuss possible interpretations of these results and how to further leveraged the MOOT to create studies contrasting TEC and EMC accounts of mimicry in facial behavior.

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