Right Temporoparietal Junction Plays a Role in the Modulation of Emotional Mimicry by Group Membership

Abstract

Our prior research demonstrated that the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) exerted a modulatory role in ingroup bias in emotional mimicry. In this study, two experiments were conducted to further explore whether the rTPJ is a neural region for emotional mimicry or for the modulation of emotional mimicry by group membership in a sham-controlled, double-blinded, between-subject design. Both experiments employed non-invasive transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to temporarily change the cortical excitability over the rTPJ and facial electromyography (fEMG) to measure facial muscle activations as an index of emotional mimicry. After the anodal or sham stimulation, participants in Experiment 1 passively viewed a series of happy clips, while participants in Experiment 2 viewed happy clips performed by ethnic ingroup and outgroup models. fEMG analyses revealed that participants in Experiment 1 showed the same degree of happy mimicry for both tDCS conditions (anodal vs. sham) and participants in Experiment 2 showed an ingroup bias in happy mimicry in the sham condition, which disappeared in the anodal condition. Taken together, the present study demonstrated that rTPJ plays a role in the modulation of emotional mimicry by group membership.

Behavioral and neural underpinnings of empathic characteristics in a Humanitude-care expert

“…Our behavioral results showed that YG exhibited stronger subjective arousal and facial mimicry than the controls. The control group did not show any clear pattern of facial mimicry, which is consistent with previous findings that facial mimicry may be decreased in response to the faces of other races than to those of the same race ( 67 – 69 ). Regardless, YG demonstrated clear facial mimicry.…”