Research on socio-ecological bases of "primitive empathy" and its psychological architecture

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Research on human ability to empathize with others is a core question encompassing natural sciences including evolutionary biology as well as human sciences, and constitutes one of the fundamental questions to understand human sociality. This project was focused on basic socio-emotional processes called "primitive empathy." This project revolved around theory-building about emotional synchronization within pairs, and has succeeded in empirically identifying a phenomenon called "facial mimicry." This is a phenomenon whereby a person replicates another person's facial expression on his/her own face. Related phenomena have been observed with mother-infant interactions, but only sporadic research exists as to the facial mimicry between non-kin adults. We hypothesized that facial mimicry serves to understand another person's emotional state in general. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a series of psycho-physiological experiments where a participant's facial electromyography (EMG) was measured while they were viewing video-clips about another individual's facial expression. The results supported our hypothesis, and suggested that facial mimicry may be a key psycho-physiological process underlying empathy.