Mimicry eases prediction and thereby smoothens social interactions.

In their "social contextual view" of emotional mimicry, authors Hess and Fischer (2022) put forward emotional mimicry as a social regulator, considering it a social act, bound to certain affiliative contexts or goals. In this commentary, we argue that the core function of mimicry is to ease predicting conspecifics' behaviours and the environment, and that as a consequence, this often smoothens social interactions. Accordingly, we make three main points. First, we argue that there is no good reason to believe that the mimicry of negative expressions is fundamentally different than the mimicry of positive or ambiguous or autonomic expressions. Second, we give examples of empirical evidence that mimicry is not always a social act. Third, we show that mimicry has primary benefits for the mimicker. As such, we will briefly summarise and elaborate on the relevant findings in these respects, and propose a comparative, multi-method and ecologically valid approach which can explain the multifaceted character of the phenomenon.

EPOCK study protocol: a mixed-methods research program evaluating cancer care coordination nursing occupations in France as a complex intervention.

BACKGROUND: Facing the increasing cancer incidence and cancer survivorship, many national strategic cancer plans have identified cancer care coordination as a priority for health service improvement. However, the high variability of practices, the diversity of definitions and underlying concepts increases the existing difficulty to standardise, replicate, transpose and assess care coordination within the French health system context. The EPOCK national study aims at evaluating practices and the working context of hospital-based cancer care coordination nurses, based on a previously designed reference framework for care coordination within the French health system context. METHODS: EPOCK is based on a comprehensive evaluation of nursing professions in cancer care coordination, considered as a complex intervention. Phase 1 (theoretical phase) will define and design a theoretical reference framework for care coordination in France through an international literature review, aiming to identify relevant models and all components of the expected framework and a structured consensus method, the Nominal group technique, aiming to select and prioritise the most relevant components already found in the literature review with regard to the French healthcare system; phase 2 (Operational phase) will consist in an in-depth analysis of practices, contexts, perceptions and attitudes related to care coordination occupations by nurses in oncology and all stakeholders (related professionals, patients and their caregivers) through a multicentric cross-sectional mixed-method evaluative study. The observed practices and contexts will be finally compared with the theoretical reference framework using both inductive and deductive approaches. DISCUSSION: This study will result in an evaluation framework identifying key models and key elements relative to cancer care coordination interventions that can be used to guide management of cancer care coordination nursing occupations within the French healthcare system. EPOCK would also assist in public decision-making to identify optimal targets, skills profiles and scope of actions for cancer coordination professions. Finally, EPOCK will describe typology of nurse practices in cancer care coordination and thus obtain precise preliminary information essential for drafting a medico-economic evaluation study of these new nursing professions' impact. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Clinicaltrial.gov registration: NCT03350776 , 11/22/2017.

Post-stroke pathway analysis and link with one year sequelae in a French cohort of stroke patients: the PAPASePA protocol study.

BACKGROUND: Stroke is a health problem with serious consequences, both in terms of mortality, and after-effects affecting patient quality of life. Stroke requires both urgent and chronic management involving the entire health care system. Although large variability in the management of stroke patients have been noticed, knowledge of the diversity and the scalability of post-stroke pathways, whether it is the care pathway or the life pathway, is currently not sufficient. Moreover the link between post-stroke pathways and patients sequelae have not been yet clearly defined. All this information would be useful to better target the needs to improve stroke patient management. The purposes are to identify the post-stroke life pathways components associated with sequelae (activity limitations - main purpose, cognitive disorders, anxio-depressive disorders, fatigue, participation restrictions) at 3 months and 1 year post-stroke, to define a typology of life pathways of patients during the post-stroke year and to analyze the social and geographical inequalities in the management of stroke. METHODS: Design: a prospective multicenter comparative cohort study with a follow up to 1 year after the acute episode. Participant centers: 13 hospitals in the Aquitaine region (France). STUDY POPULATION: patients diagnosed with a confirmed ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke included in the Aquitaine Observatory of Stroke (ObA2) cohort and voluntary to participate. Data sources are existing databases (ObA2 database and the French National Health Data System - SNDS) to collect information about care pathways, patient characteristics and stroke characteristics and Ad hoc surveys to collect information about life pathways and post-stroke sequelae. The endpoints of the study are post-stroke activity limitations evaluated by the modified Rankin score, other post-stroke sequelae (Cognitive disorders, anxio-depressive disorders, fatigue, restriction of participation) assessed by standardized and validated scales and Clusters of patients responding to pathways with common or similar characteristics.; DISCUSSION: By integrating a longitudinal dimension and relying on a large cohort, the project will make it possible to identify the sources of disturbances and the factors favorable to the outcome of the life pathways, important for the planning of the offer and the management of the public policies concerning stroke pathways. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT03865173 , March 6th, 2019.

Design and validation of a questionnaire to assess organizational culture in French hospital wards.

BACKGROUND: Although many organizational culture questionnaires have been developed, there is a lack of any validated multidimensional questionnaire assessing organizational culture at hospital ward level and adapted to health care context. Facing the lack of an appropriate tool, a multidisciplinary team designed and validated a dimensional organizational culture questionnaire for healthcare settings to be administered at ward level. METHODS: A database of organizational culture items and themes was created after extensive literature review. Items were regrouped into dimensions and subdimensions (classification validated by experts). Pre-test and face validation was conducted with 15 health care professionals. In a stratified cluster random sample of hospitals, the psychometric validation was conducted in three phases on a sample of 859 healthcare professionals from 36 multidisciplinary medicine services: 1) the exploratory phase included a description of responses' saturation levels, factor and correlations analyses and an internal consistency analysis (Cronbach's alpha coefficient); 2) confirmatory phase used the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM); 3) reproducibility was studied by a test-retest. RESULTS: The overall response rate was 80 %; the completion average was 97 %. The metrological results were: a global Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.93, higher than 0.70 for 12 sub-dimensions; all Dillon-Goldstein's rho coefficients higher than 0.70; an excellent quality of external model with a Goodness of Fitness (GoF) criterion of 0.99. Seventy percent of the items had a reproducibility ranging from moderate (Intra-Class Coefficient between 50 and 70 % for 25 items) to good (ICC higher than 70 % for 33 items). CONCLUSIONS: COMEt (Contexte Organisationnel et Managérial en Etablissement de Santé) questionnaire is a validated multidimensional organizational culture questionnaire made of 6 dimensions, 21 sub-dimensions and 83 items. It is the first dimensional organizational culture questionnaire, specific to healthcare context, for a unit level assessment showing robust psychometric properties (validity and reliability). This tool is suited for research purposes, especially for assessing organizational context in research analysing the effectiveness of hospital quality improvement strategies. Our tool is also suited for an overall assessment of ward culture and could be a powerful trigger to improve management and clinical performance. Its psychometric properties in other health systems need to be tested.

Pupil Mimicry Correlates With Trust in In-Group Partners With Dilating Pupils.

During close interactions with fellow group members, humans look into one another's eyes, follow gaze, and quickly grasp emotion signals. The eye-catching morphology of human eyes, with unique eye whites, draws attention to the middle part, to the pupils, and their autonomic changes, which signal arousal, cognitive load, and interest (including social interest). Here, we examined whether and how these changes in a partner's pupils are processed and how they affect the partner's trustworthiness. Participants played incentivized trust games with virtual partners, whose pupils dilated, remained static, or constricted. Results showed that (a) participants trusted partners with dilating pupils and withheld trust from partners with constricting pupils, (b) participants' pupils mimicked changes in their partners' pupils, and (c) dilation mimicry predicted trust in in-group partners, whereas constriction mimicry did not. We suggest that pupil-contingent trust is in-group bounded and possibly evolved in and because of group life.

When a smile becomes a fist: the perception of facial and bodily expressions of emotion in violent offenders.

Previous reports have suggested an enhancement of facial expression recognition in women as compared to men. It has also been suggested that men versus women have a greater attentional bias towards angry cues. Research has shown that facial expression recognition impairments and attentional biases towards anger are enhanced in violent criminal male offenders. Bodily expressions of anger form a more direct physical threat as compared to facial expressions. In four experiments, we tested how 29 imprisoned aggressive male offenders perceive body expressions by other males. The performance of all participants in a matching-to-sample task dropped significantly when the distracting image showed an angry posture. Violent offenders misjudged fearful body movements as expressing anger significantly more often than the control group. When violent offenders were asked to categorize facial expressions and ignore the simultaneously presented congruent or incongruent posture, they performed worse than the control group, specifically, when a smile was combined with an aggressive posture. Finally, violent offenders showed a greater congruency effect than controls when viewing postures as part of an emotionally congruent social scene and did not perform above chance when categorizing a happy posture presented in a fight scene. The results suggest that violent offenders have difficulties in processing emotional incongruence when aggressive stimuli are involved and a possible bias towards aggressive body language.

Validation of the French version of the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture questionnaire.

OBJECTIVE: To assess the psychometric properties of the French version of the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture questionnaire (HSOPSC) and study the hierarchical structure of the measured dimensions. DESIGN: Cross-sectional survey of the safety culture. SETTING: 18 acute care units of seven hospitals in South-western France. PARTICIPANTS: Full- and part-time healthcare providers who worked in the units. INTERVENTIONS: None. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Item responses measured with 5-point agreement or frequency scales. Data analyses A principal component analysis was used to identify the emerging components. Two structural equation modeling methods [LInear Structural RELations (LISREL) and Partial Least Square (PLS)] were used to verify the model and to study the relative importance of the dimensions. Internal consistency of the retained dimensions was studied. A test-retest was performed to assess reproducibility of the items. RESULTS: Overall response rate was 77% (n = 401). A structure in 40 items grouped in 10 dimensions was proposed. The LISREL approach showed acceptable data fit of the proposed structure. The PLS approach indicated that three dimensions had the most impact on the safety culture: 'Supervisor/manager expectations & actions promoting safety' 'Organizational learning-continuous improvement' and 'Overall perceptions of safety'. Internal consistency was above 0.70 for six dimensions. Reproducibility was considered good for four items. CONCLUSIONS: The French HSOPSC questionnaire showed acceptable psychometric properties. Classification of the dimensions should guide future development of safety culture improving action plans.

Attention Towards Pupil Size in Humans and Bonobos (Pan paniscus).

Previous work has established that humans have an attentional bias towards emotional signals, and there is some evidence that this phenomenon is shared with bonobos, our closest relatives. Although many emotional signals are explicit and overt, implicit cues such as pupil size also contain emotional information for observers. Pupil size can impact social judgment and foster trust and social support, and is automatically mimicked, suggesting a communicative role. While an attentional bias towards more obvious emotional expressions has been shown, it is unclear whether this also extends to a more subtle implicit cue, like changes in pupil size. Therefore, the current study investigated whether attention is biased towards pupils of differing sizes in humans and bonobos. A total of 150 human participants (141 female), with a mean age of 19.13 (ranging from 18 to 32 years old), completed an online dot-probe task. Four female bonobos (6 to 17 years old) completed the dot-probe task presented via a touch screen. We used linear mixed multilevel models to examine the effect of pupil size on reaction times. In humans, our analysis showed a small but significant attentional bias towards dilated pupils compared to intermediate-sized pupils and intermediate-sized pupils when compared to small pupils. Our analysis did not show a significant effect in bonobos. These results suggest that the attentional bias towards emotions in humans can be extended to a subtle unconsciously produced signal, namely changes in pupil size. Due to methodological differences between the two experiments, more research is needed before drawing a conclusion regarding bonobos. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00146-1.

Conscious awareness is necessary to assess trust and mimic facial expressions, while pupils impact trust unconsciously.

People make rapid inferences about others' thoughts and intentions. For example, they observe facial movements and pupil size of others and unwittingly make use of this information when deciding whether to trust someone or not. However, whether spontaneous mimicry depends on visual awareness of the stimulus and whether these processes underlie trust decisions is still unknown. To investigate whether visual awareness modulates the relationship between emotional expressions, mimicry and trust, participants played a series of trust games and saw either their partners' faces with a neutral, happy or fearful expression, or their partners' eyes in which the pupil size was large, medium or small. Subjects' trust investments, facial movements and pupil responses were measured. In half of the trials, the stimuli were rendered invisible by continuous flash suppression. Results showed that facial expressions were mimicked and influenced trust decisions during the conscious condition, but not during the unconscious (suppressed) condition. The opposite was found for pupil size, which influenced trust decisions during states of unawareness. These results suggest that the neurobiological pathway linking the observation of facial expressions to mimicry and trust is predominantly conscious, whereas partner pupil size influences trust primarily when presented unconsciously. This article is part of the theme issue 'Cracking the laugh code: laughter through the lens of biology, psychology and neuroscience'.

No Evidence for Biased Attention Towards Emotional Scenes in Bornean Orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus).

Attention may be swiftly and automatically tuned to emotional expressions in social primates, as has been demonstrated in humans, bonobos, and macaques, and with mixed evidence in chimpanzees, where rapid detection of emotional expressions is thought to aid in navigating their social environment. Compared to the other great apes, orangutans are considered semi-solitary, but still form temporary social parties in which sensitivity to others' emotional expressions may be beneficial. The current study investigated whether implicit emotion-biased attention is also present in orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus). We trained six orangutans on the dot-probe paradigm: an established paradigm used in comparative studies which measures reaction time in response to a probe replacing emotional and neutral stimuli. Emotional stimuli consisted of scenes depicting conspecifics having sex, playing, grooming, yawning, or displaying aggression. These scenes were contrasted with neutral scenes showing conspecifics with a neutral face and body posture. Using Bayesian mixed modeling, we found no evidence for an overall emotion bias in this species. When looking at emotion categories separately, we also did not find substantial biases. We discuss the absence of an implicit attention bias for emotional expressions in orangutans in relation to the existing primate literature, and the methodological limitations of the task. Furthermore, we reconsider the emotional stimuli used in this study and their biological relevance. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00158-x.

Physiological synchrony is associated with attraction in a blind date setting.

Humans are social animals whose well-being is shaped by the ability to attract and connect with one another, often through brief interactions. In addition to physical features, a choreography of movements, physical reactions and subtle expressions may help promote attraction. Here, we measured the physiological dynamics between pairs of participants during real-life dating interactions outside the laboratory. Participants wore eye-tracking glasses with embedded cameras and devices to measure physiological signals including heart rate and skin conductance. We found that overt signals such as smiles, laughter, eye gaze or the mimicry of those signals were not significantly associated with attraction. Instead, attraction was predicted by synchrony in heart rate and skin conductance between partners, which are covert, unconscious and difficult to regulate. Our findings suggest that interacting partners' attraction increases and decreases as their subconscious arousal levels rise and fall in synchrony.

Similarities and differences in perceiving threat from dynamic faces and bodies. An fMRI study.

Neuroscientific research on the perception of emotional signals has mainly focused on how the brain processes threat signals from photographs of facial expressions. Much less is known about body postures or about the processing of dynamic images. We undertook a systematic comparison of the neurofunctional network dedicated to processing facial and bodily expressions. Two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments investigated whether areas involved in processing social signals are activated differently by threatening signals (fear and anger) from facial or bodily expressions. The amygdala (AMG) was more active for facial than for bodily expressions. Body stimuli triggered higher activation than face stimuli in a number of areas. These were the cuneus, fusiform gyrus (FG), extrastriate body area (EBA), temporoparietal junction (TPJ), superior parietal lobule (SPL), primary somatosensory cortex (SI), as well as the thalamus. Emotion-specific effects were found in TPJ and FG for bodies and faces alike. EBA and superior temporal sulcus (STS) were more activated by threatening bodies.

Physiological synchrony is associated with cooperative success in real-life interactions.

Cooperation is pivotal for society to flourish. To foster cooperation, humans express and read intentions via explicit signals and subtle reflections of arousal visible in the face. Evidence is accumulating that humans synchronize these nonverbal expressions and the physiological mechanisms underlying them, potentially influencing cooperation. The current study is designed to verify this putative linkage between synchrony and cooperation. To that end, 152 participants played the Prisoner's Dilemma game in a dyadic interaction setting, sometimes facing each other and sometimes not. Results showed that synchrony in both heart rate and skin conductance level emerged during face-to-face contact. However, only synchrony in skin conductance levels predicted cooperative success of dyads. Crucially, this positive linkage was strengthened when participants could see each other. These findings show the strong relationship between our bodily responses and social behavior, and emphasize the importance of studying social processes between rather than within individuals in real-life interactions.

A review on sex differences in processing emotional signals.

Interest in sex-related differences in psychological functioning has again come to the foreground with new findings about their possible functional basis in the brain. Sex differences may be one way how evolution has capitalized on the capacity of homologous brain regions to process social information between men and women differently. This paper focuses specifically on the effects of emotional valence, sex of the observed and sex of the observer on regional brain activations. We also discuss the effects of and interactions between environment, hormones, genes and structural differences of the brain in the context of differential brain activity patterns between men and women following exposure to seen expressions of emotion and in this context we outline a number of methodological considerations for future research. Importantly, results show that although women are better at recognizing emotions and express themselves more easily, men show greater responses to threatening cues (dominant, violent or aggressive) and this may reflect different behavioral response tendencies between men and women as well as evolutionary effects. We conclude that sex differences must not be ignored in affective research and more specifically in affective neuroscience.