Neuroscience
Have you ever noticed how, when two people are talking, they seem to mimic each other's facial expressions?
Some psychologists say this is simply a case of emotions being contagious. However, others go further, arguing this mimicry plays a functional role; that by copying someone else's facial expression it helps us to better understand how they are feeling.
Now Lindsay Oberman and colleagues have tested the idea that if mimicry really does play a functional role, then disrupting our ability to mimic should interfere with our recognition of other people's facial expressions.
And that's exactly what they found when twelve students were asked to categorise morphed photographs of people's faces showing varying degrees of happiness, sadness, fear or disgust.
To disrupt their ability to mimic, the students clenched a pen between their teeth, an act that exercises many of the muscles needed to perform facial expressions. This significantly impaired the students' ability to correctly identify happiness, and to some extent also their ability to identify disgust. The identification of sadness and fear was unaffected, perhaps because these emotions are expressed less through the facial musculature and more through body posture and tone of voice. By contrast a happy expression is known to involve many facial muscles.
A control condition in which the students held a pen lightly between their lips (no use of face muscles) did not interfere with recognition of facial expression. Neither did chewing gum, which involves the facial muscles only intermittently.
“Our findings are consistent with the proposal that people's ability to understand emotions in others involves simulating their states,” the researchers said.
_________________________________
Oberman, L.M., Winkielman, P. & Ramachandran, V.S. (2007). Face to face: Blocking facial mimicry can selectively impair recognition of emotional expressions. Social Neuroscience, 2, 167-178.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
More on emotion and face recognition from the Digest:
Link to related Digest item showing violent video games slow our recognition of happy faces.
Link to related Digest item showing cryptic crosswords impair face recognition.
Link to related Digest item showing we're better at recognising the emotions of people we identify with.
- Guilt-prone People Are Highly Skilled At Recognising Other People's Emotions
It's not pleasant to feel perpetually that you're responsible for mishaps and screw-ups, but some people do. Psychologists recognise this as a distinct trait, which they call "guilt-proneness" and now they've discovered that it tends to go...
- Embodying Another Person's Face Makes It Easier To Recognise Their Fear
An illusion that provokes a sense of ownership over another person's face has provided new clues about the way we process other people's emotions. Lara Maister and her colleagues used the "enfacement" illusion, in which a person watches a two-minute...
- Facial Emotional Expressions Are Not Universal
From the Bushmen of the Kalahari to the Kalaallit of Greenland, you'll find that people everywhere frown in frustration and smile in delight. Or will you? The universality of human emotions and their expression in the face has become widely accepted...
- Of Cats And Basketball Players - How We're Better At Recognising The Emotions Of Those We Identify With
Just as we’re better at recognising people who share our ethnicity, we are also better at interpreting the emotional facial expressions of people from the same ethnic, national, or regional group as ourselves. Pascal Thibault and colleagues at the University...
- In The Weeklies
Here are some relevant highlights from this week’s major scientific and medical weeklies: British Medical Journal 08 January 2005 Risk of ischaemic stroke in people with migraine: systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies by...
Neuroscience
Biting on pen impairs people's emotion recognition
Have you ever noticed how, when two people are talking, they seem to mimic each other's facial expressions?Some psychologists say this is simply a case of emotions being contagious. However, others go further, arguing this mimicry plays a functional role; that by copying someone else's facial expression it helps us to better understand how they are feeling.
Now Lindsay Oberman and colleagues have tested the idea that if mimicry really does play a functional role, then disrupting our ability to mimic should interfere with our recognition of other people's facial expressions.
And that's exactly what they found when twelve students were asked to categorise morphed photographs of people's faces showing varying degrees of happiness, sadness, fear or disgust.
To disrupt their ability to mimic, the students clenched a pen between their teeth, an act that exercises many of the muscles needed to perform facial expressions. This significantly impaired the students' ability to correctly identify happiness, and to some extent also their ability to identify disgust. The identification of sadness and fear was unaffected, perhaps because these emotions are expressed less through the facial musculature and more through body posture and tone of voice. By contrast a happy expression is known to involve many facial muscles.
A control condition in which the students held a pen lightly between their lips (no use of face muscles) did not interfere with recognition of facial expression. Neither did chewing gum, which involves the facial muscles only intermittently.
“Our findings are consistent with the proposal that people's ability to understand emotions in others involves simulating their states,” the researchers said.
_________________________________
Oberman, L.M., Winkielman, P. & Ramachandran, V.S. (2007). Face to face: Blocking facial mimicry can selectively impair recognition of emotional expressions. Social Neuroscience, 2, 167-178.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
More on emotion and face recognition from the Digest:
Link to related Digest item showing violent video games slow our recognition of happy faces.
Link to related Digest item showing cryptic crosswords impair face recognition.
Link to related Digest item showing we're better at recognising the emotions of people we identify with.
- Guilt-prone People Are Highly Skilled At Recognising Other People's Emotions
It's not pleasant to feel perpetually that you're responsible for mishaps and screw-ups, but some people do. Psychologists recognise this as a distinct trait, which they call "guilt-proneness" and now they've discovered that it tends to go...
- Embodying Another Person's Face Makes It Easier To Recognise Their Fear
An illusion that provokes a sense of ownership over another person's face has provided new clues about the way we process other people's emotions. Lara Maister and her colleagues used the "enfacement" illusion, in which a person watches a two-minute...
- Facial Emotional Expressions Are Not Universal
From the Bushmen of the Kalahari to the Kalaallit of Greenland, you'll find that people everywhere frown in frustration and smile in delight. Or will you? The universality of human emotions and their expression in the face has become widely accepted...
- Of Cats And Basketball Players - How We're Better At Recognising The Emotions Of Those We Identify With
Just as we’re better at recognising people who share our ethnicity, we are also better at interpreting the emotional facial expressions of people from the same ethnic, national, or regional group as ourselves. Pascal Thibault and colleagues at the University...
- In The Weeklies
Here are some relevant highlights from this week’s major scientific and medical weeklies: British Medical Journal 08 January 2005 Risk of ischaemic stroke in people with migraine: systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies by...