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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Emotion Science
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1491832
This article is part of the Research Topic How Do Affective Stimuli Impact Actions? Unveiling the Relationship Between Emotional Stimuli and Motor Behavior View all 7 articles

Task-irrelevant emotional expressions are not mimicked, but may modulate the mimicry of task-relevant emotional expressions

Provisionally accepted
Heidi Mauersberger Heidi Mauersberger 1*Christophe Blaison Christophe Blaison 2Ursula Hess Ursula Hess 1
  • 1 Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
  • 2 Université de Paris, Paris, Ile-de-France, France

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Emotional mimicry—the imitation of others’ emotions—is an empathic response that helps to navigate social interactions. Mimicry is absent when participants’ task does not involve engaging with the expressers’ emotions. This may be because task-irrelevant faces (i.e., faces that participants were instructed to ignore) are not processed. To assess whether processed task-irrelevant faces are also not mimicked, we conducted three studies (Study 1: N = 74 participants (27 men; Mage = 26.9 years); Study 2: N = 53 participants (20 men; Mage = 25.8 years); Study 3: N = 51 participants (7 men; Mage = 26.8 years)) using an affective priming paradigm in which one face was task-relevant and one was to be ignored as a framework to explore the impact of disregarded yet still perceptually processed faces on mimicry. We found that even though both faces were processed, only task-relevant faces were mimicked. Hence, our studies suggest that emotional mimicry depends not only on emotional processing as such but also on the way participants prioritize one piece of information over another. Further, task-irrelevant faces interfered with the mimicry of task-relevant faces. This suggests that even though incongruent task-irrelevant faces do not elicit an empathic (mimicry) response, they still may provide a context that can change the meaning of task-relevant faces and thus impact on the mimicry response.

    Keywords: Emotional mimicry, facial emg, Attention, task-relevance, Affective Priming

    Received: 05 Sep 2024; Accepted: 05 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Mauersberger, Blaison and Hess. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Heidi Mauersberger, Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.