Facial mimicry and emotional contagion to dynamic emotional facial expressions and their influence on decoding accuracy

Abstract

The present study had the goal to assess whether individuals mimic and show emotional contagion in response to relatively weak and idiosyncratic dynamic facial expressions of emotions similar to those encountered in everyday life. Furthermore, the question of whether mimicry leads to emotional contagion and in turn facilitates emotion recognition was addressed. Forty-one female participants rated a series of short video clips of stimulus persons expressing anger, sadness, disgust, and happiness regarding the emotions expressed. An unobtrusive measure of emotional contagion was taken. Evidence for mimicry was found for all types of expressions. Furthermore, evidence for emotional contagion of happiness and sadness was found. Mediational analyses could not confirm any relation between mimicry and emotional contagion nor between mimicry and emotion recognition.