Spontaneous mimicry appears fundamental to emotional perception and contagion, especially when it involves facial emotional expressions. Here we cover recent evidence on spontaneous mimicry from ethology, psychology and neuroscience, in non-human and human animals. We first consider how mimicry unfolds in non-human animals (particularly primates) and how it relates to emotional contagion. We focus on two forms of mimicry-related phenomena: facial mimicry and yawn contagion, which are largely conserved across mammals and useful to draw evolutionary scenarios. Next, we expand on the psychological evidence from humans that bears on current theoretical debates and also informs non-human animal research. Finally, we cover the neural bases of facial mimicry and yawn contagion. We move beyond the perception/expression/experience trichotomy and from the correlational to the causal evidence that links facial mimicry to emotional contagion by presenting evidence from neuroimaging, direct manipulation, neuro-stimulation and lesion studies. In conclusion, this review proposes a bottom-up, multidisciplinary approach to the study of spontaneous mimicry that accounts for the evolutionary continuity linking non-human and human animals.

中文翻译：

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人类和非人类动物中自发模仿和情绪感染的神经行为学。

自发模仿是情感感知和传染的基础，尤其是涉及面部情感表达时。在这里，我们涵盖了来自非人类和人类动物的行为学，心理学和神经科学方面自发模仿的最新证据。我们首先考虑模仿在非人类动物（尤其是灵长类动物）中如何发展，以及它与情绪感染的关系。我们关注与模仿相关的现象的两种形式：面部模仿和哈欠传染，它们在哺乳动物中大部分都被保存下来，并有助于绘制进化场景。接下来，我们将扩展来自人类的心理学证据，这些证据涉及当前的理论辩论，并为非人类动物研究提供信息。最后，我们涵盖了面部模仿和哈欠传染的神经基础。通过提供来自神经影像学，直接操作，神经刺激和病变研究的证据，我们超越了感知/表达/体验三分法，从关联性到因果关系的证据将面部模仿与情绪传染联系起来。总之，这篇综述提出了一种自下而上的，多学科的方法来研究自发拟态，它解释了连接非人类和人类动物的进化连续性。