ArticleCommunications psychology2025
Little evidence for a role of facial mimicry in the transmission of stress from parents to adolescent children.
Article in Communications psychology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Facial mimicry predicts preference.Communications psychology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Empathic stress, the spontaneous reproduction of psychosocial stress by mere observation, has been shown to occur between strangers, romantic partners and in mother-child dyads. However, the mechanisms by which stress is transmitted have yet to be understood. We investigated whether facial mimicry modulates the transmission of psychosocial stress. Adolescents (13-16 years old) observed their mothers or fathers (N = 77) undergo a standardized laboratory stressor. Parents' and adolescents' faces were videotaped during the stress task and dyads simultaneously provided multiple samples of subjective stress, heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), and salivary cortisol. The degree to which adolescents mimicked their parents' facial expressions was calculated in a multi-step procedure based on windowed-cross-lagged-regressions. To integrate the correlational structure of mimicry across different facial action units (AU), an exploratory factor analysis was employed. The solution revealed a two-factor model, constructed of a positive latent factor subsuming mimicked action units associated with the act of smiling and a negative latent factor, subsuming mimicked action units used for various negative emotions. None of the stress markers were significantly associated with the extracted latent factors indexing mimicry between parents and adolescents, providing no statistically significant evidence for an association between facial mimicry and stress-transmission in the parent-adolescent dyad. Bayes Factors generally indicated moderate evidence for a lack of association with the positive and anecdotal evidence for a lack of association with negative latent mimicry factors. In conclusion, our approach to video-based mimicry calculation showed promising results in that mimicry of positive and negative emotions could be detected, albeit no evidence for a link to actual empathic stress transmission in the laboratory was found.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.