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Emotional Empathy, Facial Reactions, and Facial Feedback
Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Psychology.
2010 (English)Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

The human face has a fascinating capability to express emotions. The facial feedback hypothesis suggests that the human face not only expresses emotions but is also able to send feedback to the brain and modulate the ongoing emotional experience. It has furthermore been suggested that this feedback from the facial muscles could be involved in empathic reactions. This thesis explores the concept of emotional empathy and relates it to two aspects concerning activity in the facial muscles. First, do people high versus low in emotional empathy differ in regard to in what degree they spontaneously mimic emotional facial expressions? Second, is there any difference between people with high as compared to low emotional empathy in respect to how sensitive they are to feedback from their own facial muscles? Regarding the first question, people with high emotional empathy were found to spontaneously mimic pictures of emotional facial expressions while people with low emotional empathy were lacking this mimicking reaction. The answer to the second question is a bit more complicated. People with low emotional empathy were found to rate humorous films as funnier in a manipulated sulky facial expression than in a manipulated happy facial expression, whereas people with high emotional empathy did not react significantly. On the other hand, when the facial manipulations were a smile and a frown, people with low as well as high emotional empathy reacted in line with the facial feedback hypothesis. In conclusion, the experiments in the present thesis indicate that mimicking and feedback from the facial muscles may be involved in emotional contagion and thereby influence emotional empathic reactions. Thus, differences in emotional empathy may in part be accounted for by different degree of mimicking reactions and different emotional effects of feedback from the facial muscles.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis , 2010. , p. 52
Series
Digital Comprehensive Summaries of Uppsala Dissertations from the Faculty of Social Sciences, ISSN 1652-9030 ; 58
Keywords [en]
Emotional empathy, facial feedback, facial expression, emotion, empathy, mirror neurons
National Category
Psychology
Research subject
Psychology
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-126825ISBN: 978-91-554-7840-7 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:uu-126825DiVA, id: diva2:327146
Public defence
2010-09-17, Universitetshuset, sal IX, Biskopsgatan 3, Uppsala, 09:15 (Swedish)
Opponent
Supervisors
Available from: 2010-08-16 Created: 2010-06-28 Last updated: 2010-08-16Bibliographically approved
List of papers
1. Emotional empathy and facial reactions to facial expressions
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Emotional empathy and facial reactions to facial expressions
2011 (English)In: Journal of Psychophysiology, ISSN 0269-8803, E-ISSN 2151-2124, Vol. 25, no 1, p. 26-31Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

This study investigates whether people High in emotional empathy are more facially reactive than are people Low in emotional empathy when exposed to pictures of angry and happy facial expressions. Facial electromyographic activity was measured from the corrugator and the zygomatic muscle regions. In accordance with the predictions, the High empathic group reacted with larger corrugator activity to angry as compared to happy faces and with larger zygomatic activity to happy faces. However, the Low empathic group did not differentiate between the angry and happy stimuli at all. The High empathic group, as compared to the Low empathic group, also rated the angry faces as expressing more anger and the happy faces as being happier. It is concluded that high empathic people are particularly sensitive in reacting with facial reactions to facial expressions and that this ability is accompanied by a higher level of empathic accuracy.

Keywords
emotion, facial expressions, facial reactions, facial EMG, emotional accuracy
National Category
Psychology
Research subject
Psychology
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-126763 (URN)10.1027/0269-8803/a000029 (DOI)000287021500004 ()
Available from: 2010-06-24 Created: 2010-06-24 Last updated: 2022-01-28Bibliographically approved
2. Emotional Empathy and Facial Feedback
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Emotional Empathy and Facial Feedback
2008 (English)In: Journal of nonverbal behavior, ISSN 0191-5886, E-ISSN 1573-3653, Vol. 32, no 4, p. 215-224Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

We studied if emotional empathy is related to sensitivity to facial feedback. The participants, 112 students, rated themselves on the questionnaire measure of emotional empathy (QMEE) and were divided into one high and one low empathic group. Facial expressions were manipulated to produce a happy or a sulky expression. During the manipulation, participants rated humorous films with respect to funniness. These ratings were the dependent variable. No main effect of facial expression was found. However, a significant interaction between empathy and condition indicated that the high as compared to the low empathic group rated the films as being funnier in a happy condition and a tendency to be less funny in a sulky condition. On the basis of the present results we suggest emotional empathy to be one important and previously ignored factor to explain individual differences in effects of facial feedback.

Keywords
Emotion, Emotional empathy, Facial expression, Facial feedback
National Category
Psychology
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-17859 (URN)10.1007/s10919-008-0052-z (DOI)000259863300003 ()
Available from: 2008-09-08 Created: 2008-09-08 Last updated: 2022-01-28Bibliographically approved
3. Emotional empathy, facial manipulations and facial feedback
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Emotional empathy, facial manipulations and facial feedback
(English)Article in journal (Other academic) Submitted
Abstract [en]

People with a low but not people with a high degree of emotional empathy have been found to rate humorous films as funnier in a sulky versus a happy facial manipulation, in contrast to what the facial feedback hypothesis predicts (Andréasson & Dimberg, 2008). Experiment 1 replicated this finding with people with extra ordinary high or low degree of emotional empathy. Interestingly, when the facial manipulations were a smile versus a frown, as in experiment 2, people with low as well as high emotional empathy reacted as predicted by the facial feedback hypothesis. In conclusion, emotional empathy is suggested to be related to effects of facial feedback in some facial manipulations but not in others.

Keywords
Emotional empathy, facial feedback, facial expression, emotion, empathy
National Category
Psychology
Research subject
Psychology
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-126767 (URN)
Available from: 2010-06-24 Created: 2010-06-24 Last updated: 2011-02-25Bibliographically approved

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