Inhibiting orofacial mimicry affects authenticity perception in vocal emotions.

Although emotional mimicry is ubiquitous in social interactions, its mechanisms and roles remain disputed. A prevalent view is that imitating others' expressions facilitates emotional understanding, but the evidence is mixed and almost entirely based on facial emotions. In a preregistered study, we asked whether inhibiting orofacial mimicry affects authenticity perception in vocal emotions. Participants listened to authentic and posed laughs and cries, while holding a pen between the teeth and lips to inhibit orofacial responses (n = 75), or while responding freely without a pen (n = 75). They made authenticity judgments and rated how much they felt the conveyed emotions (emotional contagion). Mimicry inhibition decreased the accuracy of authenticity perception in laughter and crying, and in posed and authentic vocalizations. It did not affect contagion ratings, however, nor performance in a cognitive control task, ruling out the effort of holding the pen as an explanation for the decrements in authenticity perception. Laughter was more contagious than crying, and authentic vocalizations were more contagious than posed ones, regardless of whether mimicry was inhibited or not. These findings confirm the role of mimicry in emotional understanding and extend it to auditory emotions. They also imply that perceived emotional contagion can be unrelated to mimicry. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Higher trait mindfulness is associated with empathy but not with emotion recognition abilities.

Mindfulness involves an intentional and non-judgemental attention or awareness of present-moment experiences. It can be cultivated by meditation practice or present as an inherent disposition or trait. Higher trait mindfulness has been associated with improved emotional skills, but evidence comes primarily from studies on emotion regulation. It remains unclear whether improvements extend to other aspects of emotional processing, namely the ability to recognize emotions in others. In the current study, 107 participants (M age = 25.48 years) completed a measure of trait mindfulness, the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire, and two emotion recognition tasks. These tasks required participants to categorize emotions in facial expressions and in speech prosody (modulations of the tone of voice). They also completed an empathy questionnaire and attention tasks. We found that higher trait mindfulness was associated positively with cognitive empathy, but not with the ability to recognize emotions. In fact, Bayesian analyses provided substantial evidence for the null hypothesis, both for emotion recognition in faces and in speech. Moreover, no associations were observed between mindfulness and attention performance. These findings suggest that the positive effects of trait mindfulness on emotional processing do not extend to emotion recognition abilities.