Mimicry and the Judgment of Emotional Facial Expressions

Lipps (1907) presented a model of empathy which had an important influence on later formulations. According to Lipps, individuals tend to mimic an interaction partner's behavior, and this nonverbal mimicry induces—via a feedback process—the corresponding affective state in the observer. The resulting shared affect is believed to foster the understanding of the observed person's self. The present study tested this model in the context of judgments of emotional facial expressions. The results confirm that individuals mimic emotional facial expressions, and that the decoding of facial expressions is accompanied by shared affect. However, no evidence that emotion recognition accuracy or shared affect are mediated by mimicry was found. Yet, voluntary mimicry was found to have some limited influence on observer' s assessment of the observed person's personality. The implications of these results with regard to Lipps' original hypothesis are discussed. The communication of emotions and thoughts is an important aspect of everyday social interactions. Specifically, our ability to understand the emotional states as well as the interpersonal intent of our interaction partners influences the quality of our social interactions. The process underlying the understanding of another's emotional and cognitive point of view is called "empathy." In its original usage empathy referred to the tendency of observers to project themselves "into" another person in order to know the other person. This notion was first expressed by Lipps (1907) who believed that empathy is mediated by the imitation (mimicry) of other's behavior. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 23(1), Spring 1999 C 1999 Human Sciences Press, Inc. 5 Sylvie Blairy, Department of Psychiatry, Erasme Hospital, Free University of Brussels; Pedro Herrera and Ursula Hess, Department of Psychology, University of Quebec at Montreal. This research was supported by a grant from the FCAR (#95NC1345) to Ursula Hess. We are grateful to Patrick Bourgeois and Joelle Couture for help with the data collection. We would like to thank Gilles Kirouac for relevant suggestions and comments on this paper. This article constitues a portion of the doctoral thesis of the first author, and a portion of the honors thesis of the second author. Results were presented in part at the 26th International Congress of Psychology, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 16-25 August 1996. Address correspondence to Sylvie Blairy, Department of Psychiatry, Erasme Hospital, route de Lennik, 808, Bruxelles, Belgium; E-mail: [email protected]. Specifically, Lipps proposed a three-step model. First, witnessing the affective behavior (e.g., facial expressions, postures) of an interaction partner leads to imitation by the observer. Second, the observer's nonverbal mimicry induces—via a feedback process—the corresponding affective state in the observer. Third, the mimicking observers employ their internal states to understand the observed person's self. That is, the shared affect facilitates the understanding of the observed person's self. Clinical scholars of various orientations have accorded the notions expressed by this model an important place in the psychotherapeutic process (see Hess, Philippot, & Blairy, in press). Specifically, Lipps' model was adopted by Freud (1921/1955) who considered mimicry a key process for empathy, that is, the understanding of the patient's emotional feeling states and perspectives. In fact, several therapeutic approaches such as dance therapy encourage mimicry of the client's behavior as means to enhance therapist's empathy (e.g., Ivey, Ivey, & Simek-Drowning, 1987; Siegel, 1995). However, so far, the effectiveness of this process has not been established (Banninger-Huber & Steiner, 1992). The present study investigated Lipps' model with a specific focus on mimicry of emotional facial expressions. One should note that Lipps' model is not restrained to the mimicry of emotional facial expression. In fact, the model is more general and encompasses different aspects of knowledge P) of the other's self that can be expressed through nonverbal communication channels and thus imitated. Facial expressions convey information regarding various characteristics of an individual such as gender, age, emotional state, attitude, personality traits (see Ekman, 1978). In the framework of present study, we decided to focus on facial expressive behavior and on two types of information commonly expressed through this channel, specifically, emotional state and personality. In the first part of the present paper, we tested Lipps' model for emotion recognition accuracy. That is, we argue that the improvement of knowledge regarding another's "self" should in this context lead to an increase in recognition accuracy. We therefore investigated the two causal links that articulate Lipp's model in this context, that is, the link between facial mimicry and emotion recognition accuracy on one hand, and the link between shared affect and emotion recognition accuracy on the other hand. Further, in the second part of the paper, we tested the notion that facial mimicry enhances empathy with regard to personality assessments in a first impression paradigm. Specifically, based on findings that empathy leads to more positive evaluations (e.g., Turner & Berkowitz, 1972; Batson, Duncan, Ackerman, Buckley, & Birch, 1981), we tested the notion that facial mimicry leads to more positive judgments of a target person's dominance and affiliation traits. These 6 JOURNAL OF NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR SYLVIE BLAIRY, PEDRO HERRERA, URSULA HESS two traits were chosen because of their link to facial displays (e.g., Knutson, 1996; Hess, Blairy, & Kleck, in prep). Mimicry and Emotion Recognition As mentioned above, three different processes are implicated in the application of Lipps' model to emotion recognition. First, mimicry of emotional displays; second, emotional contagion, and finally, the facilitating effect of emotional contagion on interpersonal judgments. We will now turn to a brief review of the literature regarding these three processes in the context of emotional facial expressions. Previous research suggests that individuals tend to mimic an interaction partner's facial displays (e.g., Bavelas, Black, Lemery, Maclnnis, & Mullet, 1986; Dimberg, 1982, 1988; Englis, Vaughan, & Lanzetta, 1982; Hess, Philippot, & Blairy, 1998 ; McHugo, Lanzetta, Sullivan, Masters, & Englis, 1985; Lanzetta & Englis, 1989; Lundqvist, 1995; Vaughan & Lanzetta, 1980, 1981; Wallbott, 1991, for a review see Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994; see also Hess, Philippot, & Blairy, in press). For example, Dimberg (1982) showed participants a series of emotional facial expressions of anger and happiness and measured muscular activity at the Corrugator Supercilii (brow) and Zygomaticus Major (cheek) sites. Dimberg found that participants showed more Corrugator Supercilii activity when they were exposed to angry expressions than when they were exposed to happy expressions as well as more Zygomaticus Major activity when they were exposed to happy expressions than when they were exposed to angry expressions. However, facial mimicry does not always occur. For example, Hess et al. (1998) specifically investigated observers' facial reactions to emotional facial expressions in a series of judgment tasks. The results revealed that, depending on the nature of the decoding task, facial reactions to facial expressions may be either affective or cognitive. Specifically, participants were found to mimic only when they were asked to make affective judgments regarding the emotional facial expressions whereas when observers had to decide whether an emotional facial expression was posed or spontaneous, no mimicry was found. In this latter case, Corrugator Supercilii activity was related to cognitive load. Further, Lanzetta and colleagues found evidence for counter-mimicry, that is, facial expressions contrary to those shown by the model (e.g., Englis et al., 1982; Lanzetta & Orr, 1986). In sum, there is evidence that observers mimic facial displays. However, the findings on counter mimicry and those reported by Hess et al. 7