ArticleCognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience2022
Altering Facial Movements Abolishes Neural Mirroring of Facial Expressions.
Article in Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 15 citations in OpenAlex.
- A transdisciplinary framework for empathy research.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Emotions spread like contagious diseases.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Review
- Neural Correlates of Emotion Regulation and Associations With Disordered Eating During Preadolescence.Developmental psychobiology · 2025Article
- Zygomaticus activation through facial neuromuscular electrical stimulation (fNMES) induces happiness perception in ambiguous facial expressions and affects neural correlates of face processing.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Article
- Cross-modal decoding of emotional expressions in fMRI-Cross-session and cross-sample replication.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Lower empathy for face mask wearers is not explained by observer's reduced facial mimicry.PloS one · 2024Article
- Neural mechanisms for emotional contagion and spontaneous mimicry of live facial expressions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Down and up! Does the mu rhythm index a gating mechanism in the developing motor system?Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2023Review
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
People tend to automatically imitate others' facial expressions of emotion. That reaction, termed "facial mimicry" has been linked to sensorimotor simulation-a process in which the observer's brain recreates and mirrors the emotional experience of the other person, potentially enabling empathy and deep, motivated processing of social signals. However, the neural mechanisms that underlie sensorimotor simulation remain unclear. This study tests how interfering with facial mimicry by asking participants to hold a pen in their mouth influences the activity of the human mirror neuron system, indexed by the desynchronization of the EEG mu rhythm. This response arises from sensorimotor brain areas during observed and executed movements and has been linked with empathy. We recorded EEG during passive viewing of dynamic facial expressions of anger, fear, and happiness, as well as nonbiological moving objects. We examine mu desynchronization under conditions of free versus altered facial mimicry and show that desynchronization is present when adult participants can freely move but not when their facial movements are inhibited. Our findings highlight the importance of motor activity and facial expression in emotion communication. They also have important implications for behaviors that involve occupying or hiding the lower part of the face.
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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.