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

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，这取决于我们与另一个人的关系和互动的背景。一种从根本上相关的反应是情绪模仿，即模仿他人的情绪表达。模仿有时被称为“社交粘合剂”，因为它对社交关系密切起着重要作用。具体地说，人们想要加入那些模仿他们的人，反过来他们又模仿他们想要加入的人。Hess和Fischer(2013)的语境观中的情感模仿强调了社会语境变量作为关联意图的调节因素的重要性，从而强调了模仿的重要性。这项拟议的研究扩展了这一观点，将语境中一个被忽视但必不可少的方面--它所引发的情感--包括在内。具体地说，许多互动发生在情绪激动的环境中，互动伙伴所经历的情绪会影响他们加入的愿望。本研究旨在研究在通过环境刺激诱导情绪的生态环境中，情绪状态和互动伙伴的从属性质对模仿的联合影响。为此，我们将创建一个虚拟现实“公园漫步”，参与者在其中遇到情感诱导事件，并“遇到”组内/组外成员(研究1)以及面部优势/从属关系不同的个体(研究2)，这些人表现出适当的表情(快乐、悲伤、愤怒)。参与者遇到虚拟互动伙伴的情感氛围、他们表达的上下文适当性以及他们引发的从属动机预计会影响参与者加入的愿望。我们预测，高度唤醒的负面情境最不利于模仿，除非高度关联的目标被认为是相似的。相反，在愉快的情境中，对低亲和性目标(外群成员，低亲和性的面孔)的模仿会被强化，因为接受者有更多的心理资源，特别是当目标表现出适当的表情时。尽管日常社交场合经常充满情感，但很少有研究认为同时情感是模仿的调节因素。即使是那些在模仿任务之前通常也会操纵情绪的人。相比之下，这项拟议的研究将把参与者嵌入到一个生态有效的虚拟现实环境中，在这种环境中，诱导的情感与情感他人被遇到和模仿的情况直接相关。这种方法将使我们更接近于理解在日常生活中发生的这一人类社会互动的重要促进者背后的过程。

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.