ArticleScientific reports2019
Facial Complexity in Sun Bears: Exact Facial Mimicry and Social Sensitivity.
Article in Scientific reports, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- The development of play face mimicry: comparative insights from human infants, adults and orangutans.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Article
- Towards the complexity of laugh communication in great apes: exact facial replications in laugh faces of orangutans and chimpanzees.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Article
- Rapid mimicry of trunk and head movements during play in African Savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana).Scientific reports · 2025Article
- If you blink at me, I'll blink back. Domestic dogs' feedback to conspecific visual cues.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Automatic imitation of intransitive actions in macaws.iScience · 2024Article
- Computational investigation of the social function of domestic cat facial signals.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Orangutans and chimpanzees produce morphologically varied laugh facesin response to the age and sex of their social partners.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Smiling underwater: Exploring playful signals and rapid mimicry in bottlenose dolphins.iScience · 2024Article
- Raising an Eye at Facial Muscle Morphology in Canids.Biology · 2024Article
- Play face in Japanese macaques reflects the sender's play motivation.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Laughter, play faces and mimicry in animals: evolution and social functions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Playing together, laughing together: rapid facial mimicry and social sensitivity in lowland gorillas.Current zoology · 2022Article
- Visual communication in social play of a hierarchical carnivore species: the case of wild spotted hyenas.Current zoology · 2022Article
- The Complexity and Phylogenetic Continuity of Laughter and Smiles in Hominids.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Mirror replication of sexual facial expressions increases the success of sexual contacts in bonobos.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Conformity-like behaviour in mice observing the freezing of other mice: a model of empathy.BMC neuroscience · 2020Article
- Intraspecific Motor and Emotional Alignment in Dogs and Wolves: The Basic Building Blocks of Dog-Human Affective Connectedness.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2020Review
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Facial mimicry is a central feature of human social interactions. Although it has been evidenced in other mammals, no study has yet shown that this phenomenon can reach the level of precision seem in humans and gorillas. Here, we studied the facial complexity of group-housed sun bears, a typically solitary species, with special focus on testing for exact facial mimicry. Our results provided evidence that the bears have the ability to mimic the expressions of their conspecifics and that they do so by matching the exact facial variants they interact with. In addition, the data showed the bears produced the open-mouth faces predominantly when they received the recipient's attention, suggesting a degree of social sensitivity. Our finding questions the relationship between communicative complexity and social complexity, and suggests the possibility that the capacity for complex facial communication is phylogenetically more widespread than previously thought.
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