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

在日常生活中，我们周围都是经历和表达情感的人，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。一个基本相关的反应是情绪模仿，模仿他人的情绪表达。模仿有时被称为“社会胶水”，因为它在社会亲密关系中起着重要作用。具体来说，人们想要与那些模仿他们的人建立联系，反过来他们也模仿那些他们想要建立联系的人。Hess和Fischer（2013）的情境中的情绪模仿观点强调了社会情境变量作为附属意图和模仿的调节因子的重要性。拟议中的研究扩展了这一观点，包括了上下文中一个被忽视但很重要的方面——它所引发的情绪。具体来说，许多互动发生在充满情感的环境中，互动伙伴所经历的情感影响了他们对隶属关系的渴望。本研究旨在研究在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综合影响。为此，我们将创建一个虚拟现实“在公园里散步”，在这个场景中，参与者会遇到影响诱导事件，并“遇到”群内/群外成员（研究1），以及在面部优势/隶属关系上不同的个体（研究2），他们会表现出适当的表情（快乐、悲伤、愤怒）。参与者与虚拟互动伙伴相遇时的情感氛围、他们表达的语境适宜性以及他们所引发的隶属动机，预计会影响参与者的隶属欲望。我们预测，高唤起的消极情境将最不利于模仿，除了高亲和力的目标被认为是相似的。相比之下，低亲和力目标（外群体成员、低亲和力面孔）的模仿在愉悦的环境中会被增强，感知者有更多的心理资源，特别是当目标表现出适当的表情时。本研究旨在填补我们对社会情境效应理解上的一个重要空白。尽管日常社会环境经常充满了情感，但只有很少的研究认为并发情感是模仿的调节因素。即使是那些在模仿任务之前典型地操纵情绪的人。相比之下，拟议的研究将参与者嵌入生态有效的虚拟现实环境中，其中诱导的影响与遇到和模仿情绪他人的情况直接相关。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。

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.