Coordinated behavior patterns are one of the pillars of social interaction. Researchers have recently shown that movement synchrony influences ratings of rapport, and the extent to which groups are judged to be a unit. The current experiments investigated the hypothesis that observers infer a shared psychological state from synchronized movement rhythms, influencing attributions of rapport and entitativity judgments. Movement rhythms of observed individuals are manipulated between participants (Experiment 1) or kept constant while the source of the emerging movement synchrony is manipulated (Experiment 2), and both rapport and perceived entitativity are measured. The findings support the assumption that movement synchrony increases attributed rapport and perceived entitativity. Furthermore, mediational analyses reveal that the effects of movement synchrony on perceived unity are not purely perceptual in nature, but caused by psychological inferences. Observers infer the degree to which individuals are a social unit from their movement rhythms.Coordinated behavior patterns are one of the pillars of social interaction. Peoples' movement rhythms can synchronize unintentionally, for example when walking side by side, or intentionally, as when military units march. The tendency to synchronize movement rhythms has been theorized to play an important role in the formation of a social unit (Condon

How do you decide whether the emotion expressed on another person's face is positive or negative? Emotions may be perceived via two routes. The longer (slower) route involves matching visual input with stored knowledge about emotions. The shorter (faster) route involves empathic emotions that serve as proprioceptive cues in emotion recognition. In line with embodiedcognition theory (Barsalou, Niedenthal, Barbey, & Ruppert, 2003), we propose that mimicry may result in faster emotion recognition because it facilitates use of the shorter route. To test this idea, we studied the effect of constraining mimicry on speed of emotion recognition.Consistent with the present view, perceivers spontaneously mimic facial expressions of emotions (Dimberg, 1990), and their own experienced emotions are affected accordingly (Stel, Van Baaren, & Vonk, in press). Freezing the face reduces the experience of emotional empathy (Stel et al., in press). Blairy, Herrera, and Hess (1999) failed to demonstrate a link between mimicry and accuracy of emotion recognition. However, we propose that mimicry facilitates the short route of one's access to others' emotions, which means that mimicry should affect speed, but not accuracy, of emotion recognition.We hypothesized that participants will recognize a briefly exposed facial expression of emotion more slowly when they are unable to mimic facial expressions than when they are free to mimic the expression. Moreover, we expect this effect to be more pronounced for women than for men: Women are more facially expressive than are men (LaFrance & Hecht, 2000), and facial feedback may be more important in emotion-related processing for women than it is for men.

Mimicry is functional for empathy and bonding purposes. Studies on the consequences of mimicry at a behavioral level demonstrated that mimicry increases prosocial behavior. However, these previous studies focused on the mimickee. In the present paper, we investigated whether mimickers also become more helpful due to mimicry. In two studies, we have demonstrated that participants, who mimicked expressions of a person shown on a video, donated more money to a charity than participants who did not mimic. Moreover, the processes by which mimicry and prosocial behavior are related largely remain empirically unexamined in existing literature. The results of Study 2 confirmed our hypothesis that affective empathy mediates the relationship between mimicry and prosocial behavior. This suggests that mimicry created an affective empathic mindset, which activated prosocial behaviors directed toward others.

Mimicry has benefits for people in social interactions. However, evidence regarding the consequences of mimicry is incomplete. First, research on mimicry has particularly focused on effects of being mimicked. Secondly, on the side of the mimicker evidence is correlational or lacks real interaction data. The present study investigated effects for mimickers and mimickees in face-to-face interaction. Feelings towards the immediate interaction partner and the interaction in which mimicry takes place were measured after an interaction between two participants in which mimicry did or did not occur. Results revealed that mimickers and mimickees became more affectively attuned to each other due to bidirectional influences of mimicry. Additionally, both mimickers and mimickees reported more feelings of having bonded with each other and rated the interaction as smoother.

Facial feedback mechanisms of adolescents with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) were investigated utilizing three studies. Facial expressions, which became activated via automatic (Studies 1 and 2) or intentional (Study 2) mimicry, or via holding a pen between the teeth (Study 3), influenced corresponding emotions for controls, while individuals with ASD remained emotionally unaffected. Thus, individuals with ASD do not experience feedback from activated facial expressions as controls do. This facial feedback-impairment enhances our understanding of the social and emotional lives of individuals with ASD.