TY  - JOUR
A1  - Drimalla, Hanna
A1  - Landwehr, Niels
A1  - Hess, Ursula
A1  - Dziobek, Isabel
T1  - From face to face
BT  - the contribution of facial mimicry to cognitive and emotional empathy
JF  - Cognition and Emotion
N2  - Despite advances in the conceptualisation of facial mimicry, its role in the processing of social information is a matter of debate. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between mimicry and cognitive and emotional empathy. To assess mimicry, facial electromyography was recorded for 70 participants while they completed the Multifaceted Empathy Test, which presents complex context-embedded emotional expressions. As predicted, inter-individual differences in emotional and cognitive empathy were associated with the level of facial mimicry. For positive emotions, the intensity of the mimicry response scaled with the level of state emotional empathy. Mimicry was stronger for the emotional empathy task compared to the cognitive empathy task. The specific empathy condition could be successfully detected from facial muscle activity at the level of single individuals using machine learning techniques. These results support the view that mimicry occurs depending on the social context as a tool to affiliate and it is involved in cognitive as well as emotional empathy.
KW  - Facial mimicry
KW  - empathy
KW  - emotional
KW  - cognitive
KW  - complex emotions
Y1  - 2019
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2019.1596068
SN  - 0269-9931
SN  - 1464-0600
VL  - 33
IS  - 8
SP  - 1672
EP  - 1686
PB  - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY  - Abingdon
ER  -