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Sad and Lonely? Sad Mood Suppresses Facial Mimicry

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Abstract

The aim of the current study was to investigate the influence of happy and sad mood on facial muscular reactions to emotional facial expressions. Following film clips intended to induce happy and sad mood states, participants observed faces with happy, sad, angry, and neutral expressions while their facial muscular reactions were recorded electromyografically. Results revealed that after watching the happy clip participants showed congruent facial reactions to all emotional expressions, whereas watching the sad clip led to a general reduction of facial muscular reactions. Results are discussed with respect to the information processing style underlying the lack of mimicry in a sad mood state and also with respect to the consequences for social interactions and for embodiment theories.

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Notes

  1. Activity of the M. Frontalis medialis equates to Action Unit 1 in the Facial Action Coding System (Ekman and Friesen 1978) and according to EMFACS (Friesen and Ekman 1984) Action Unit 1 is part of the expression of sadness. However, this is only rarely reported as a result in EMG studies.

  2. Because of this discrepancy with the pilot study, we suspected that the lack of a mood effect was due to the mood dissipating over the course of the experiment. To verify this assumption, we conducted another study with the same procedures as our main study, but varying when mood was measured: immediately after its induction or in the end of the experiment. The results of this study confirmed our assumption. Whereas we found significant differences immediately after the clips, there were no longer significant differences after the presentation of the facial expressions, independent of whether mood was measured only after the presentation of the facial expressions or after the film clips and after the facial expressions. Details of this pilot study are available upon request.

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Acknowledgments

The research was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG WE2930/2-1) and a Postdoc-grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG) to the third author (SE 1121/3-1).

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  1. Beate Seibt

    Present address: The Centro de Investigação e Intervenção Social (CIS), ISCTE, Lisbon, Portugal

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Biological Psychology, Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg, Marcusstr 9-11, 97070, Würzburg, Germany

    Katja U. Likowski, Peter Weyers, Beate Seibt, Christiane Stöhr, Paul Pauli & Andreas Mühlberger

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  1. Katja U. Likowski
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  2. Peter Weyers
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Correspondence to Peter Weyers.

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Likowski, K.U., Weyers, P., Seibt, B. et al. Sad and Lonely? Sad Mood Suppresses Facial Mimicry. J Nonverbal Behav 35, 101–117 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-011-0107-4

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