ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2020
Stressed connections: cortisol levels following acute psychosocial stress disrupt affiliative mimicry in humans.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 20 citations in OpenAlex.
- Navigating Stress: Exploring the Role of Empathy in Caregiving.Developmental psychobiology · 2026Article
- Little evidence for a role of facial mimicry in the transmission of stress from parents to adolescent children.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Article
- Altruism under Stress: Cortisol Negatively Predicts Charitable Giving and Neural Value Representations Depending on Mentalizing Capacity.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Article
- Stressed connections: cortisol levels following acute psychosocial stress disrupt affiliative mimicry in humans.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 4 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Mimicry, and especially spontaneous facial mimicry, is a rudimentary element of social-emotional experience that is well-conserved across numerous species. Although such mimicry is thought to be a relatively automatic process, research indicates that contextual factors can influence mimicry, especially in humans. Here, we extend this work by investigating the effect of acute psychosocial stress on spontaneous facial mimicry. Participants performed a spontaneous facial mimicry task with facial electromyography (fEMG) at baseline and approximately one month later, following an acute psychosocial stressor (Trier Social Stress Test). Results show that the magnitude of the endocrine stress response reduced zygomaticus major reactivity, and specifically spontaneous facial mimicry for positive social stimuli (i.e. smiles). Individuals with higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol showed a more blunted fEMG response to smiles, but not to frowns. Conversely, stress had no effect on corrugator supercilii activation (i.e. frowning to frowns). These findings highlight the importance of the biological stress response system in this basic element of social-emotional experience.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.