Lecture 7: Emotions and social interactions

Averill on emotions

• Social function of emotions is underestimated in other theories
• Universality is overestimated (cultural differences)
• Emotions are not biologically driven

Averill’s social construct theory

• Emotions are social constructions that give shape and meaning to our social world
• Emotions are learned behaviors that can be acquired if people are exposed to them within a particular culture
• Emotions have an important social role, i.e., they exist to inform and influence each other

Empathy

• Broad definition: Capacity to perceive, share, and understand other’s affective states
• =sympathy, emotional contagion, personal distress, and cognitive perspective taking
  • Sympathy (compassion): affective state related to the other, but does not require affective isomorphism. I feel sorry for you because you are sad, but I am not sad myself. -> Link between empathy and prosocial behavior is meditated by sympathy.
  • Personal distress: negative affective state (e.g., anxiety, worry, discomfort) that can be elicited by the affective states of others, but it is self-centered rather than other-oriented. No isomorphic, it sometimes results from emotional contagion (no self-other distinction). When you see other people suffering you might react with a negative affective state motivating you to turn away in order to feel better -> can be reversed by learning how to turn empathy into compassion (can be seen as an emotion-regulation strategies)
  • Emotional contagion: affect sharing that is isomorphic, but does not meet the self-other distinction requirement, nor perspective taking. You feel happy because everyone around you is happy (no knowledge that the others are the source of this state)
  • Cognitive perspective taking: the ability to understand the feelings of others, to represent the mental and affective states of others, without being emotionally involved. Cognitive understanding that someone is sad, without any emotional effect -> put yourself mentally in the shoes of the other

Affective vs. Cognitive Empathy

• Affective empathy: taking over other’s emotions
• Cognitive empathy: appraisal of the other’s situation and attempts to understand the cause of the other’s emotions.

Purpose of emotions

• ADAPTIVE ROLE: mother-child bonding, parental care of offspring
• EPISTEMOLOGICAL ROLE: to make faster and more accurate predictions of other people’s needs and actions and discover salient aspects of our environment
• SOCIAL ROLE: reciprocal altruism, social communication, cooperation and moral reasoning

Automaticity of social emotions

• Fake emotions are consciously controlled
• Real emotions occur automatically (control eye regions)

Imitation

• Action replication – similarity between the observed and the reactive movement
• Mimicry: Ability to duplicate observed movements
• True imitation: Ability to perceive and understand the intention of another agent, or the goal of his/her action, and to re-enact that action to achieve the intended goal (immediately or offline)
• It is a widespread phenomenon in the behavior of many animal species, stands as a primitive form of imitation.
• Imitative mirroring in humans starts very early in life
• Newborn infants (42 min old!) are able to replicate some gestures when seeing adults performing them(Meltzoff & Moore, 1997)
• 18-month-old children are able to ‘re-enact’ intended actions (Meltzoff, 1995)
• 14-month-old children are also able to recognize when they are being imitated by others

Empathy & imitation

• Empathy is related to the capacity to react to and to mimic emotional others à emotional imitation
• Emotional expressions are highly contagious
• Emotional expressions mimicry influences the observer’s own emotional and emphatic behavior 

Emotional expression imitation

• The perception of facial expression of emotion automatically triggers activity in brain regions involved in experiencing similar emotions (Van der Gaag et al., 2007).
•  Viewing facial expressions triggers distinctive patterns of facial muscle activity similar to the observed expression, even in the absence of conscious recognition of the stimulus (Dimberg et al., 2000).

Role of imitation/mimicry

• To foster liking (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999; Lakin & Chartrand 2003)
• To increase self-other similarity and to bound people together (Bavelas et al., 1986; 1988)
• To increase interpersonal trust (Hale & Hamilton, 2016)

Empathetic imitation of actions

• Emphatic responses are amplified by similarity, familiarity, social closeness, and positive experience with the other (Preston & de Waal, 2002)
• The more we like a person, the more we imitate his/her actions
• The more we imitate a person, the more that persons will like us
• High empathy participants produced greater mimicry than the low-empathy participants (Sonnby-Borgstrom et al., 2003).