A walk through the park: Understanding emotional mimicry in an ecological context

公园散步：理解生态背景下的情感模仿

• 批准号: 431077921
• 负责人: Professorin Dr. Ursula Hess
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Lehrstuhl für Sozial- und Organisationspsychologie
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2018-12-31 至 2021-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/431077921?language=en
• 关键词: walk; through; park; Understanding; emotional

In everyday life, we are surrounded by people who experience and express emotions, and we are called upon to react appropriately, depending on our relationship with the other person and the context of the interaction. One fundamentally relevant reaction is emotional mimicry, the imitation of the emotional expressions of others. Mimicry is sometimes referred to as “social glue” because of its important role for social closeness. Specifically, people want to affiliate with those who mimic them and in turn they mimic those with whom they want to affiliate. The Emotional Mimicry in Context view by Hess and Fischer (2013) emphasizes the importance of social context variables as moderators of affiliative intent and thereby of mimicry. The proposed research extends this view to include a neglected but essential aspect of context – the emotions it elicits. Specifically, many interactions occur in emotionally charged contexts and the emotions experienced by interaction partners influence their desire for affiliation. The proposed research has the aim to study the combined influence of emotional states and the affiliative nature of the interaction partner on mimicry in an ecological setting in which emotions are induced via environmental stimuli. For this, we will create a virtual reality “walk in the park” in which participants encounter affect inducting events and “meet” ingroup/ outgroup members (Study 1) as well as individuals differing in facial dominance/affiliation (Study 2) who show context (in)appropriate expressions (happiness, sadness, anger).The affective ambience in which participants encounter their virtual interaction partners, and the context appropriateness of their expressions, as well as the affiliation motive they elicit, are expected to affect participants’ desire to affiliate. We predict that high arousal negative situations will be least conducive to mimicry, except for high affiliative targets who are perceived as similar. By contrast, mimicry of low affiliative targets (outgroup members, faces low in affiliativeness) will be mimicked in enhanced in pleasant contexts, where perceivers have more psychological resources, especially when targets show appropriate expressions.The proposed research has the aim to fill an important gap in our understanding of social context effects. Even though everyday social contexts are frequently affect-laden, only very few studies have even considered concurrent affect as a moderator of mimicry. Even those have typically manipulated emotions prior to the mimicry task. By contrast, the proposed research will embed participants in an ecologically valid virtual reality context in which the induced affect is directly related to the situation in which emotional others are encountered and mimicked. This approach will bring us closer to understanding the processes underlying this important facilitator of human social interactions as they occur in everyday life.

在日常生活中，我们周围都是体验和表达情感的人，我们被要求做出适当的反应，这取决于我们与他人的关系和互动的背景。一个基本的相关反应是情绪模仿，模仿他人的情绪表达。模仿有时也被称为“社会粘合剂”，因为它在社会亲密度方面发挥着重要作用。具体来说，人们想与模仿他们的人交往，反过来，他们也会模仿他们想交往的人。Hess and Fischer（2013）的情境中的情绪模仿（Emotional Mimicry in Context view）强调了社会情境变量作为亲和意图调节因子的重要性，从而也是模仿的调节因子。拟议中的研究扩展了这一观点，包括一个被忽视的，但重要的方面的背景-情绪，它elevated。具体来说，许多互动都发生在充满情感的环境中，互动伙伴所经历的情感会影响他们对归属感的渴望。这项拟议的研究旨在研究在通过环境刺激诱发情绪的生态环境中，情绪状态和互动伙伴的从属性对模仿的综合影响。为此，我们将创建一个虚拟现实的“公园散步”，参与者遇到影响诱导事件，并“会见”内群体/外群体成员（研究1）以及面部优势/从属关系不同的个体（研究2），他们表现出适当的表达（快乐，悲伤，愤怒）。参与者遇到他们的虚拟互动伙伴的情感氛围，其表达的语境恰当性以及所引发的归属动机会影响参与者的归属意愿。我们预测，高唤醒的负面情况下，将最有利于模仿，除了高亲和目标谁被认为是相似的。相比之下，低亲和性目标（外群体成员，低亲和性的面孔）的模仿将在愉快的环境中被增强，在那里感知者有更多的心理资源，特别是当目标显示适当的表情。尽管日常的社会环境经常充满情感，但只有很少的研究甚至认为并发情感是模仿的调节剂。即使是那些在模仿任务之前已经典型地操纵了情绪的人。相比之下，拟议的研究将参与者嵌入一个生态有效的虚拟现实环境中，其中诱导的影响是直接相关的情况下，情绪他人遇到和模仿。这种方法将使我们更接近于理解这一重要的人类社会互动促进者在日常生活中发生的过程。