The tendency to imitate the actions of others appears to be a fundamental aspect of human social interaction. Emotional expressions are a particularly salient form of social stimuli (Vuilleumier & Schwartz, 2001) but their relationship to imitative behaviour is currently unclear. In this paper we report the results of five studies which investigated the effect of a target's dynamic emotional stimuli on participants' tendency to respond compatibly to the target's actions. Experiment one examined the effect of dynamic emotional expressions on the automatic imitation of opening and closing hand movements. Experiment two used the same basic paradigm but added gaze direction as an additional factor. Experiment three investigated the effect of dynamic emotional expressions on compatibility responses to handshakes. Experiment four investigated whether dynamic emotional expressions modulated response to valenced social gestures. Finally, experiment five compared the effects of dynamic and static emotional expressions on participants' automatic imitation of finger lifting. Across all five studies we reliably elicited a compatibility effect however, none of the studies found a significant modulating effect of emotional expression. This null effect was also supported by a random effects meta-analysis and a series of Bayesian t-tests. Nevertheless, these results must be caveated by the fact that our studies had limited power to detect effect sizes below d = 0.4. We conclude by situating our findings within the literature, suggesting that the effect of emotional expressions on automatic imitation is, at best, minimal.

模仿他人行为的倾向似乎是人类社会互动的一个基本方面。情绪表达是一种特别突出的社会刺激形式（Vuilleumier & Schwartz，2001），但它们与模仿行为的关系目前尚不清楚。在本文中，我们报告了五项研究的结果，这些研究调查了目标的动态情绪刺激对参与者对目标行为做出一致反应的倾向的影响。实验一检查动态情绪表达对自动模仿张开和合拢手部动作的影响。实验二使用相同的基本范例，但添加了注视方向作为附加因素。实验三研究了动态情绪表达对握手兼容性反应的影响。实验四研究动态情绪表达是否调节对有价社交手势的反应。最后，实验五比较了动态和静态情绪表达对参与者自动模仿举手指的影响。在所有五项研究中，我们可靠地引发了相容性效应，但是，没有一项研究发现情绪表达具有显着的调节作用。这种零效应也得到了随机效应荟萃分析和一系列贝叶斯t检验的支持。然而，这些结果必须受到以下事实的警告：我们的研究检测 d = 0.4 以下效应大小的能力有限。最后，我们将我们的研究结果放在文献中，表明情感表达对自动模仿的影响充其量是最小的。