Elsevier

Acta Psychologica

Volume 212, January 2021, 103226
Acta Psychologica

Dynamic emotional expressions do not modulate responses to gestures

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2020.103226Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • The effect of emotional expressions on automatic imitation is currently unclear.

  • We used dynamic expressions to investigate this effect across five experiments.

  • We found that the expressions did not affect the imitation of response to gestures.

  • This was the case even when the gestures had affective or social meaning.

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Meaningful gestures
Automatic imitation
Emotion
Stimulus response compatibility
Facial expressions

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