Abstract
The aim of the present study was to test the classic but under-researched hypothesis that individual differences in automatic emotional mimicry are positively related to individual differences in emotional contagion. To tap automatic mimicry and automatic emotional contagion, participants were exposed to affective stimuli with either a positive or negative valence (faces with a happy expression, n = 73; faces with a sad expression, n = 73) while their attention was directed toward nonaffective features of the stimuli. Emotional mimicry was measured with EMG (Corrugator, Zygomaticus). On average, in the sad emotional expression condition, participants’ mood worsened, but the happy emotional expression condition did not evoke a general positive emotional contagion effect (across participants). Multigroup multilevel latent difference models revealed that in the sad emotional expression condition, individual differences in Corrugator activity were related to a larger increase in unpleasant mood, and in the happy emotional expression condition, individual differences in Zygomaticus activity were related to a larger decrease in unpleasant mood. That is, results of this study provided support for the mimicry-contagion link.
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Notes
It is interesting to note that for the concept of emotional contagion, a parallel differentiation was suggested: Neumann and Strack (2000) argued that a largely unconscious, automatic form of catching another person’s feelings should not result in a discrete emotion (i.e., an objected-directed state such as pride or anger) but in a congruent mood state (i.e., a diffuse state that is not directed toward a specific object; e.g., pleasant versus unpleasant mood). Neumann and Strack’s (2000) empirical findings largely confirmed this idea, and this is also why the authors preferred the term mood contagion over emotional contagion.
We checked whether a log-transformation of the EMG data would change the results. Results on mean differences within and across experimental conditions and on individual differences in Corrugator and Zygomaticus activity predicting mood change remained the same. Hence, we report the results for the non-transformed EMG scores.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by a grant to Tanja Lischetzke, Michael Niedeggen, and Michael Eid by the Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion” at Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the German Research Foundation as part of the German Excellence Initiative. The authors would like to thank Stephan König for his help with Matlab.
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Lischetzke, T., Cugialy, M., Apt, T. et al. Are Those Who Tend to Mimic Facial Expressions Especially Vulnerable to Emotional Contagion?. J Nonverbal Behav 44, 133–152 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-019-00316-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-019-00316-z