This article explores interpersonal functions of emotional mimicry under the absence versus the presence of visual contact between the interacting partners. We review relevant literature and stress that previous studies on the role of emotional mimicry were focused on imitative responses to facial displays. We also show that the rules explaining why people mimic facial expressions may be inapplicable when visual signals are unavailable (e.g., people attending an online meeting have their cameras off). Overall, our review suggests that emotional mimicry (...) functionally adapts to whether the perceiver and the expresser can see each other. We, therefore, argue that blocking visual contact between them may provide insight into emotional mimicry's social functions, thereby clarifying its role in fostering affiliation and emotional understanding. (shrink)

Recent research has demonstrated the importance of positive emotions, and especially compassion, for well-being. Via two investigations, we set out to determine if facial expressions of happiness,...

How did human vocalizations come to acquire meaning in the evolution of our species? Charles Darwin proposed that language and music originated from a common emotional signal system based on the imitation and modification of sounds in nature. This protolanguage is thought to have diverged into two separate systems, with speech prioritizing referential functionality and music prioritizing emotional functionality. However, there has never been an attempt to empirically evaluate the hypothesis that a single communication system can split into two functionally (...) distinct systems that are characterized by music- and languagelike properties. Here, we demonstrate that when referential and emotional functions are introduced into an artificial communication system, that system will diverge into vocalization forms with speech- and music-like properties, respectively. Participants heard novel vocalizations as part of a learning task. Half referred to physical entities and half functioned to communicate emotional states. Participants then reproduced each sound with the defined communicative intention in mind. Each recorded vocalization was used as the input for another participant in a serial reproduction paradigm, and this procedure was iterated to create 15 chains of five participants each. Referential vocalizations were rated as more speech-like, whereas emotional vocalizations were rated as more music-like, and this association was observed cross-culturally. In addition, a stable separation of the acoustic profiles of referential and emotional vocalizations emerged, with some attributes diverging immediately and others diverging gradually across iterations. The findings align with Darwin’s hypothesis and provide insight into the roles of biological and cultural evolution in the divergence of language and music. (shrink)

Emotional facial expressions can inform researchers about an individual's emotional state. Recent technological advances open up new avenues to automatic Facial Expression Recognition (FER). Based on machine learning, such technology can tremendously increase the amount of processed data. FER is now easily accessible and has been validated for the classification of standardized prototypical facial expressions. However, applicability to more naturalistic facial expressions still remains uncertain. Hence, we test and compare performance of three different FER systems (Azure Face API, Microsoft; Face++, (...) Megvii Technology; FaceReader, Noldus Information Technology) with human emotion recognition (A) for standardized posed facial expressions (from prototypical inventories) and (B) for non-standardized acted facial expressions (extracted from emotional movie scenes). For the standardized images, all three systems classify basic emotions accurately (FaceReader is most accurate) and they are mostly on par with human raters. For the non-standardized stimuli, performance drops remarkably for all three systems, but Azure still performs similarly to humans. In addition, all systems and humans alike tend to misclassify some of the non-standardized emotional facial expressions as neutral. In sum, emotion recognition by automated facial expression recognition can be an attractive alternative to human emotion recognition for standardized and non-standardized emotional facial expressions. However, we also found limitations in accuracy for specific facial expressions; clearly there is need for thorough empirical evaluation to guide future developments in computer vision of emotional facial expressions. (shrink)

Happiness is typically reported as an important reason for participating in challenging activities like extreme sport. While in the middle of the activity, however, participants do not seem particularly happy. So where does the happiness come from? The article proposes some answers from a study of facially expressed emotions measured moment-by-moment during a backcountry skiing event. Self-reported emotions were also assessed immediately after the skiing. Participants expressed lower levels of happiness while skiing, compared to when stopping for a break. Moment-to-moment (...) and self-reported measures of emotions were largely unrelated. These findings are explained with reference to the Functional Wellbeing Approach ( Vittersø, 2013 ), which argues that some moment-to-moment feelings are non-evaluative in the sense of being generated directly by the difficulty of an activity. By contrast, retrospective emotional feelings are more complex as they include an evaluation of the overall goals and values associated with the activity as a whole. (shrink)

Emotion expressions convey valuable information about others’ internal states and likely behaviours. Accurately identifying expressions is critical for social interactions, but so is perceiver confidence when decoding expressions. Even if a perceiver correctly labels an expression, uncertainty may impair appropriate behavioural responses and create uncomfortable interactions. Past research has found that perceivers report greater confidence when identifying emotions displayed by cultural ingroup members, an effect attributed to greater perceptual skill and familiarity with own-culture than other-culture faces. However, the current research (...) presents novel evidence for an ingroup advantage in emotion decoding confidence across arbitrary group boundaries that hold culture constant. In two experiments using different stimulus sets participants not only labeled minimal ingroup expressions more accurately, but did so with greater confidence. These results offer novel evidence that ingroup advantages in emotion decoding confidence stem partly from social-cognitive processes. (shrink)

There is increasing interest in clarifying how different face emotion expressions are perceived by people from different cultures, of different ages and sex. However, scant availability of well-controlled emotional face stimuli from non-Western populations limit the evaluation of cultural differences in face emotion perception and how this might be modulated by age and sex differences. We present a database of East Asian face expression stimuli, enacted by young and older, male and female, Taiwanese using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). (...) Combined with a prior database, this present database consists of 90 identities with happy, sad, angry, fearful, disgusted, surprised and neutral expressions amounting to 628 photographs. 20 young and 24 older East Asian raters scored the photographs for intensities of multiple-dimensions of emotions and induced affect. Multivariate analyses characterized the dimensionality of perceived emotions and quantified effects of age and sex. We also applied commercial software to extract computer-based metrics of emotions in photographs. Taiwanese raters perceived happy faces as one category, sad, angry, and disgusted expressions as one category, and fearful and surprised expressions as one category. Younger females were more sensitive to face emotions than younger males. Whereas older males showed reduced face emotion sensitivity, older female sensitivity was similar or accentuated relative to young females. Commercial software dissociated six emotions according to the FACS demonstrating that defining visual features were present. Our findings show that East Asians perceive a different dimensionality of emotions than Western-based definitions in face recognition software, regardless of age and sex. Critically, stimuli with detailed cultural norms are indispensable in interpreting neural and behavioral responses involving human facial expression processing. To this end, we add to the tools, which are available upon request, for conducting such research. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFacial features that resemble emotional expressions influence key social evaluations, including trust. Here, we present four experiments testing how the impact of such expressive features is qualified by their processing difficulty. We show that faces with mixed expressive features are relatively devalued, and faces with pure expressive features are relatively valued. This is especially true when participants first engage in a categorisation task that makes processing of mixed expressions difficult and pure expressions easy. Critically, we also demonstrate that the impact (...) of categorisation fluency depends on the specific nature of the expressive features. When faces vary on valence, trust judgments increase with their positivity, but also depend on fluency. When faces vary on social motivation, trust judgments increase with their approachability, but remain impervious to disfluency. This suggests that people intelligently use fluency to make judgments on val... (shrink)

ABSTRACTFacial mimicry has long been considered a main mechanism underlying emotional contagion. A closer look at the empirical evidence, however, rev...

Research indicates that emotional mimicry predominantly occurs in response to affiliative displays, such as happiness, while the mimicry of antagonistic displays, like anger, is seldom observed in social contexts. However, contextual factors, including the identity of the displayer (e.g. social similarity with the observer) and whose action triggered the emotional reaction (i.e. to whom display is directed), can modulate the meaning of the display. In two experiments, participants observed happiness, sadness, and anger expressed by individuals with similar or different social (...) attitudes in response to actions from either a participant or another person. Results demonstrated that three manipulated factors – displayer social similarity, whose action caused an emotional display, and the type of emotional display – affected participants’ perception of the display. In turn, mimicry was predominantly observed in response to happiness (Experiments 1 and 2), to a lesser extent to sadness (Experiment 1), and not to anger. Furthermore, participants mimicked individuals who were more socially similar (Experiment 1), while whose action caused an emotional reaction did not influence mimicry. The findings suggest that when the context mitigates the meaning of negative or antagonistic facial displays, it does not necessarily increase the inclination to mimic them. (shrink)

To avoid contagion, we need information about the health status of those whom we engage with. This is especially important when we have cause for concern that the other is indeed sick, such as is the case during the world-wide outbreak of the coronavirus in 2020. In three studies, one conducted several years before the pandemic, and two during the pandemic, we showed that facial expressions of emotions are used as signals of health status. Specifically, happy expressers are perceived as (...) healthier than expressers showing negative emotions or neutrality (Studies 1–3), whereas anger was interpreted as a signal of ill health (Study 3). Importantly, however, facial expressions affected health perception only when there was a prior reason to suspect ill health. This was the case for older expressers before and after the pandemic for whom age-related stereotypes set expectations of ill health and for all ages during a wide-spread pandemic, which extends this suspicion to everyone. In Study 3, we showed that the effect of emotion expressions was also generalized to the physical distance that the observer wishes to keep from the expresser. Overall, this research is the first to show a role of emotion expressions in informing health perception. (shrink)

Facial electromyography (EMG) was used to investigate patterns of facial mimicry in response to partial facial expressions in two contexts that differ in how naturalistic and socially significant the faces are. Experiment 1 presented participants with either the upper- or lower-half of facial expressions and used a forced-choice emotion categorisation task. This task emphasises cognition at the expense of ecological and social validity. Experiment 2 presented whole heads and expressions were occluded by clothing. Additionally, the emotion recognition task is more (...) open-ended. This context has greater social validity. We found mimicry in both experiments, however mimicry differed in terms of which emotions were mimicked and the extent to which the mimicry involved muscle sites that were not observed. In the more cognitive context, there was relatively more motor matching (i.e. mimicking only what was seen). In the more socially valid context, participants were less likely to mimic only what they saw – and instead mimicked what they knew. Additionally, participants mimicked anger in the cognitive context but not the social context. These findings suggest that mimicry involves multiple mechanisms and that the more social the context, the more likely it is to reflect a mechanism of social regulation. (shrink)