Face it - You only copy what you care about!

Emotional mimicry - the mirroring of another person's facial expressions - is a key component of empathy and social interaction.While it's generally understood that we mimic the emotions of those we're engaging with, it's less clear how our brains handle emotional information that's present but not directly relevant to the task at hand. The Social and Organizational Psychology Group (Ursula Hess) investigated whether we mimic emotions from faces we are instructed to ignore, even though those faces are still visually processed. If you are interested whether task-irrelevant faces are simply not processed or if their presence has a more nuanced effect on our empathic responses, check out their Frontiers in Psychology Article!

Abstract

Emotional mimicry—the imitation of others’ emotions—is an empathic response that helps to navigate social interactions. Mimicry is absent when participants’ task does not involve engaging with the expressers’ emotions. This may be because task-irrelevant faces (i.e., faces that participants were instructed to ignore) are not processed. To assess whether processed task-irrelevant faces are also not mimicked, we conducted three studies [Study 1: N = 74 participants (27 men; M_age = 26.9 years); Study 2: N = 53 participants (20 men; M_age = 25.8 years); Study 3: N = 51 participants (7 men; M_age = 26.8 years)] using an affective priming paradigm in which one face was task-relevant and one was to be ignored, as a framework to explore the impact of disregarded yet still perceptually processed faces on mimicry. We found that even though both faces were processed, only task-relevant faces were mimicked. Hence, our studies suggest that emotional mimicry depends not only on emotional processing as such but also on the way participants prioritize one piece of information over another. Further, task-irrelevant faces interfered with the mimicry of task-relevant faces. This suggests that even though incongruent task-irrelevant faces do not elicit an empathic (mimicry) response, they still may provide a context that can change the meaning of task-relevant faces and thus impact on the mimicry response.