Sit with someone cheerful and you tend to leave cheerful. That might be courtesy, or inference, or something more mechanical. Scholars from a wide variety of disciplines have been studying what carries it. The classic answer involves the face, and the face does more than display.
Partly by copying the face. The review covers the classic evidence for attention, and as the sparks of primitive . It then turns to newer work on how mimicry fosters contagion and supports the ability to read other people’s thoughts, feelings and emotions.
Scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, using a variety of scientific techniques, have begun to study the influence of attention, facial mimicry and on emotional contagion. That breadth is why a review is the right instrument here.
The first part covers the classic evidence, documenting the role of attention, facial mimicry and feedback in sparking primitive emotional contagion. Those three are the pieces of the original mechanism.
The second part covers what has accumulated since, on how facial mimicry fosters contagion and supports the ability to read other people’s thoughts, feelings and emotions. The claim about reading others is the more interesting half, since it makes mimicry a tool for understanding rather than only a channel for infection.
The review ends by speculating briefly about where future research might be headed, which is the honest ending for a field still assembling its mechanisms. Nothing here is a single decisive experiment.
wat. Copying a face is one of the routes a feeling takes to the next person.
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If reading other people runs partly through imitating them, then understanding is a bodily act and not only a mental one.
How do we know?
Hatfield and colleagues review the classic research documenting attention, facial mimicry and feedback in primitive emotional contagion, then the recent evidence amassed with a variety of scientific techniques.
What is still unknown
This is a review of work across disciplines rather than a single study, and it closes by speculating about where the research might go.
Learn something?
Where to next
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How far is a therapist’s empathy tied to the success of therapy?empathy
How does a crow that has never been caught learn which face to avoid?faces