Host: The Japanese Society for Cognitive Psychology
There are two possible mechanisms of understanding others’ emotion: cognitive process and empathic process. Current evidence suggests that emotional empathy is caused by embodied simulation. So, we assume that emotion recognition is related to imitative response throughout emotional empathy. In this study, we focused on the individual differences in the capacity of emotional empathy, then investigated the influence of empathy on imitative response while emotion recognition. Participants estimated emotion of facial expressions and filled a questionnaire about emotional empathy. During the task, we recorded facial muscle activity, heart rate, sweating and skin temperature. There were significant correlations between the emotion estimation scores and the physiological signals only in a low empathy group. This is consistent with the previous result that automatic imitative response was inhibited by social context. Thus, our results suggest that imitative response affect to emotion recognition but high empathy individuals inhibit superficial imitative response.
