Emotional mimicry in social context [electronic resource] / edited by Ursula Hess, Department of Psychology, Humboldt University of Berlin, Agneta H. Fischer, Department of Social Psychology, University of Amsterdam.

"In everyday life we actively react to the emotion expressions of others, responding by showing matching, or sometimes contrasting, expressions. Emotional mimicry has important social functions such as signalling affiliative intent and fostering rapport and is considered one of the cornerstones of successful interactions. This book provides a multidisciplinary overview of research into emotional mimicry and empathy and explores when, how and why emotional mimicry occurs. Focusing on recent developments in the field, the chapters cover a variety of approaches and research questions, such as the role of literature in empathy and emotional mimicry, the most important brain areas involved in the mimicry of emotions, the effects of specific psychopathologies on mimicry, why smiling may be a special case in mimicry, whether we can also mimic vocal emotional expressions, individual differences in mimicry and the role of social contexts in mimicry"-- Provided by publisher.

"Sociality is central to being human and it depends on our ability to understand others, but not just in the way that we might understand something physical, like how to pick an apple from a tree. In this chapter I draw together some threads of other chapters in the book, and develop the idea that human sociality is based on emotions and that it involves sharing pieces of mind. Empathy offers a clear example of emotion-based sharing of mind. As explained in this book's Chapter 9 by Walter and colleagues, it enables us to experience in our selves something of an emotion of another person. Singer et al. (2004) studied the phenomenon by monitoring the brains of respondents when they were themselves experiencing pain and when they were signalled that a loved one in another room was experiencing the same kind of pain. The anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex were activated in both cases. A piece of brain activation and a piece of mind were shared. De Vignemont and Singer's (2006) explain that empathy, of this kind, occurs when someone has an emotion that is similar to that of another person, when one sees or imagines the other person having that emotion, and when one knows that the other is the source of one's own emotion"-- Provided by publisher.