The Modulation of Mimicry by Ethnic Group-Membership and Emotional Expressions

Abstract

Mimicry has been ascribed affiliative functions. In three experiments, we used a newly developed social-affective mimicry task (SAMT) to investigate mimicry´s modulation by emotional facial expressions (happy, angry) and ethnic group-membership (White in-group, Black out-group). Experiment 1 established the main consistent effect across experiments, which was enhanced mimicry to angry out-group faces compared to angry in-group faces. Hence the SAMT was useful for experimentally investigating the modulation of mimicry. Experiment 2 demonstrated that these effects were not confounded by general aspects of response conflict, as a Simon task resulted in different response patterns than the SAMT. Experiment 2 and pooled analysis of Experiments 1 and 2 also corroborated the finding of enhanced mimicry to angry out-group faces. Experiment 3 tested whether this effect was related to perceptions of threat, by framing angry persons as physically threatening, or not. Selective enhancement of mimicry to out-group persons framed as physically threatening confirmed this hypothesis. Further support for the role of threat was derived from implicit measures showing, in all experiments, that black persons were more strongly associated with threat. Furthermore, enhanced mimicry was consistently related to response facilitation in the execution of congruent movements. This suggests that mimicry acted as a social congruency signal. Our findings suggest that mimicry may serve as an appeasement signal in response to negative affiliative intent. This extends previous models of mimicry, which have predominantly focused on its role in reciprocating affiliation. It suggests that mimicry might not only be used to maintain and establish affiliative bonds, but also to ameliorate a negative social situation.

The Influence of Facial Signals on the Automatic Imitation of Hand Actions

“…Following benchmark interpretations of Cohen's d, the effect sizes are small-to-medium or medium in size (Cohen's d z = 0.41, 0.52). Considered in isolation, these data are consistent with view that imitation may work to increase affiliation with a happy person (Chartrand and Lakin, 2013), but also to appease someone who appears to be angry (Rauchbauer et al, 2016). …”

“…Bars represent point estimates and 95% confidence intervals for the effect of interest from each study in the meta-analysis, as well as the combined random effects model. Whilst this manuscript was under review an additional paper was published (Rauchbauer et al, 2016). The authors kindly provided their data to use in our meta-analysis for completeness of reporting previous effects.…”

“…Finally, inclusion of baseline trials in the automatic imitation task (Rauchbauer et al, 2016), where participants respond to a number cue when the observed hand remains still could have clarified whether response times were generally speeded up or slowed down in response to the presentation of emotionally expressive faces. This could elucidate whether expressive faces influenced basic reaction times or whether the influence of expressions is specific to an imitative response.…”

Putting Ourselves in Another’s Skin: Using the Plasticity of Self-Perception to Enhance Empathy and Decrease Prejudice

“…They showed that the amount of synchrony involved in a ritual was a key factor in increasing the amount of money offered by participants in a subsequent public goods game. The same authors also found that the effect of synchronous action on pro-social behaviour was not confined to interaction partners but also encompassed non-partners, indicating that synchronous action can act as a general prime towards pro-social behaviour (Reddish, Bulbulia, & Fischer, 2014). This last finding suggests that the effects of synchronous action with one member of a social out-group may generalise towards other out-group members.…”

“…Interestingly, a follow-up study on White participants found that differences in mu suppression for Black versus White actors were abolished when the actors made a threatening action (Gutsell & Inzlicht, 2013). Similarly, Rauchbauer, Majdandžić, Stieger, and Lamm (2016) showed that when White participants viewed an angry Black face while observing gestures, they showed greater interference in executing their actions than seeing an angry White face. These findings suggest that for White participants, threatening actions of Black individuals are given greater priority in processing.…”