ArticleFrontiers in psychology2019
Empathy in Facial Mimicry of Fear and Disgust: Simultaneous EMG-fMRI Recordings During Observation of Static and Dynamic Facial Expressions.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 60 citations in OpenAlex.
- The shared neural substrates of emotional mimicry and emotional contagion: an activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis and meta-analytic connectivity modeling analysis.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Pooled it
- Familiarity with children improves the ability to recognize children's mental states: an fMRI study using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task and the Nencki Children Eyes Test.Scientific reports · 2020Trial
- From seeing to showing: towards a neuroscience of emotion production.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- Emotion regulation dynamics in empathy in young children.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Dyadic differences in empathy scores are associated with kinematic similarity during conversational question-answer pairs.Discourse processes · 2025Article
- Changes in facial expressions can distinguish Parkinson's disease via Bayesian inference.Frontiers in neurology · 2025Article
- Hemodynamic and electrophysiological responses of the human amygdala during face imitation-a study using functional MRI and intracranial EEG.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Lower empathy for face mask wearers is not explained by observer's reduced facial mimicry.PloS one · 2024Article
- What is missing in the study of emotion expression?Frontiers in psychology · 2023Review
- Behavioral and neural underpinnings of empathic characteristics in a Humanitude-care expert.Frontiers in medicine · 2023Article
- Differential beta desynchronisation responses to dynamic emotional facial expressions are attenuated in higher trait anxiety and autism.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Audience facial expressions detected by automated face analysis software reflect emotions in music.Behavior research methods · 2022Article
- Simulated proximity enhances perceptual and physiological responses to emotional facial expressions.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Oxytocin Impairs the Recognition of Micro-Expressions of Surprise and Disgust.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- The Recognition of Facial Expressions Under Surgical Masks: The Primacy of Anger.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
- Computational Process of Sharing Emotion: An Authentic Information Perspective.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- The Transdiagnostic Relevance of Self-Other Distinction to Psychiatry Spans Emotional, Cognitive and Motor Domains.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
- Event-related EEG oscillatory responses elicited by dynamic facial expression.Biomedical engineering online · 2021Article
- Right Temporoparietal Junction Plays a Role in the Modulation of Emotional Mimicry by Group Membership.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Article
- The Resting-State Electroencephalogram Microstate Correlations With Empathy and Their Moderating Effect on the Relationship Between Empathy and Disgust.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Real-life faces are dynamic by nature, particularly when expressing emotion. Increasing evidence suggests that the perception of dynamic displays enhances facial mimicry and induces activation in widespread brain structures considered to be part of the mirror neuron system, a neuronal network linked to empathy. The present study is the first to investigate the relations among facial muscle responses, brain activity, and empathy traits while participants observed static and dynamic (videos) facial expressions of fear and disgust. During display presentation, blood-oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal as well as muscle reactions of the corrugator supercilii and levator labii were recorded simultaneously from 46 healthy individuals (21 females). It was shown that both fear and disgust faces caused activity in the corrugator supercilii muscle, while perception of disgust produced facial activity additionally in the levator labii muscle, supporting a specific pattern of facial mimicry for these emotions. Moreover, individuals with higher, compared to individuals with lower, empathy traits showed greater activity in the corrugator supercilii and levator labii muscles; however, these responses were not differentiable between static and dynamic mode. Conversely, neuroimaging data revealed motion and emotional-related brain structures in response to dynamic rather than static stimuli among high empathy individuals. In line with this, there was a correlation between electromyography (EMG) responses and brain activity suggesting that the Mirror Neuron System, the anterior insula and the amygdala might constitute the neural correlates of automatic facial mimicry for fear and disgust. These results revealed that the dynamic property of (emotional) stimuli facilitates the emotional-related processing of facial expressions, especially among whose with high trait empathy.
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