“Anger? No, thank you. I don't mimic it”: how contextual modulation of facial display meaning impacts emotional mimicry

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotional mimicry
• facial display of emotions
• social similarity
• emotions in social context

Acknowledgements

MO: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Supervision AT: Investigation, Validation, Data curation & pre-analysis, Visualisation, Writing – review & editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As noted by Wróbel and Imbir (2019), mimicry of anger, if occurs, is reported mainly when experimental settings are somewhat “acontextual”, i.e. no additional information about presented individual or context is provided. However, since emotional displays intrinsically convey social signals, even under these conditions, greater muscle responsiveness is observed for happiness than for sadness or anger.

2 The pretest, assessing the effectiveness of the manipulation, was conducted on 37 participants using a similar procedure in which the second part consisted of a block of face evaluation tasks. The results of the third part showed that ratings of the similarity of individuals with similar attitudes were higher than those with different attitudes. Participants responded to question “What attitudes did this person have?” on a scale of 0-3, where 0 represents “very dissimilar to mine” and 3 “very similar to mine,” M_Similar = 1.84, SD = 0.68 vs. M_Dissimilar = 0.88, SD = 0.61 – t(36) = 4.94, p < .001, d = 0.81. The original study of Wróbel and Królewiak (2017), from which the manipulation method and questionnaire questions were drawn also demonstrated that participants liked similar individuals more and experienced positive emotions more intensely when they observed such individuals expressing happiness.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Centre in Poland [grant number 2016/21/HS6/01179] awarded to MO.