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An Exploratory Study on the Psychophysiological Relationship Between Active Facial Imitation and Emotion Perception

Man Fai Edward Ho1*, Christopher Sufani1, Frances De Blasio1, Jacqueline A. Rushby1* and Skye McDonald1
  • 1 University of New South Wales, School of Psychology, Australia

Aim: The Facial feedback hypothesis proposes that imitation of facial expression allows individuals to perceive, recognise and produce appropriate responses to the observed emotional facial expressions. The current study attempted to investigate whether actively imitating angry expressions, improves the behavioural performance in an emotion recognition task (ERT). Furthermore, we explore the utility of the arousal/activation model to reveal whether the arousal change induced by active mimicry (task activation) would be associated with performance improvement in the ERT. Method: Forty-four participants were randomly divided into three groups. These three groups were instructed to either actively imitating angry expressions (AM), passively viewing angry expressions (PA) or passively viewing neutral expressions (PN), while their skin conductance level (SCL) was recorded to assess arousal. At the end of manipulation task, all groups received an ERT. Results: No performance difference was found between groups. However, it was found that the AM group improved significantly across intensity for angry expressions. Furthermore, a correlational analysis revealed inverse correlations between task activation and performance in response latency, which approached significance. Further, the correlational analysis also revealed that the performance in accuracy for angry and disgust emotions in AM group was significantly and negatively correlated with task activation. Conclusion: The results suggest that active imitation may improve the performance of accuracy over intensity in angry expressions. Furthermore, task activation may overly activate participants, which may impair behavioural performance. Thus, we speculate that there may be an optimal activation level to perform ERT. Overall, this study suggests that arousal change may be utilized to better understand the relationship between activation and performance. Future study may examine the effect of facial mimicry on global performance improvement of emotion recognition, and the association between accuracy performance and task activation.

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Keywords: facial feedback hypothesis, skin conductance level, arousal/activation model, emotion recognition, active facial mimicry

Conference: ASP2017: 27th Annual Meeting for the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology, Parramatta, Australia, 29 Nov - 1 Dec, 2017.

Presentation Type: Poster Presentation

Topic: Abstract (Student Award)

Citation: Ho M, Sufani C, De Blasio F, Rushby JA and McDonald S (2019). An Exploratory Study on the Psychophysiological Relationship Between Active Facial Imitation and Emotion Perception. Conference Abstract: ASP2017: 27th Annual Meeting for the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2017.224.00027

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Received: 14 Oct 2017; Published Online: 25 Jan 2019.

* Correspondence:
Mr. Man Fai Edward Ho, University of New South Wales, School of Psychology, Kensington, Australia, mfho92@gmail.com
Dr. Jacqueline A Rushby, University of New South Wales, School of Psychology, Kensington, Australia, jrushby@psy.unsw.edu.au