The majority of people almost automatically mimic what they see. For example, we smile when we see someone else smile, and we grimace when we see a person in pain. To a normal person these reaction may just be a way of responding to an image, but reseach has discovered that such mimicry helps people, especially women, to quickly interpret the other person's expressions.
Dutch psychologists Mariëlle Stel and and Ad van Knippenberg performed a study in which 62 research participants were shown a series of faces, each for less than a tenth of a second. After seeing them, the viewers had to press a button indicating if the image they viewed was positive or negative. For half of the trials, the participants were instructed to not make any facial expressions while viewing the pictures by clenching their teeth together. In a controlled envirnment, the participants were told to hold their shoulders down while tehy viewed the pictures ( the psychologists believed that this would be as distracting as clenching their teeth). The results showed that the women responded faster than the men when they were free to make facial expressions. When the contraint was put on the participants, the men were not affected, but the women's speed to respond went down to the men's level. Stel and Knippenberg believe that this shows that the women use facial expression as a "fast route" to determine the expression of someone else.
I thought that this article was interesting becuase I never knew that facial expressions helped people recognize each other's mood. I thought it was just something people did out of habit, like me! haha. Here's the link to my article!
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=when-imitation-is-more-than-flattery
10 comments:
this article is soo truee!
like with that saying, "a smile is contagious" you feel like smiling whenever someone smiles at you =)
and i uploaded our one tree hill picture on my blog!
come seee =) <3333
Nice post! I like your article. It's interesting how people imitate.
Wow! That's interesting, and it's amazing how true it is.
Your article was great! I've never knew people imitated like that.
This is pretty cool. soooo true!
moods are contagious, but we don't really think about it..
Arghhh! Every time someone yawns I yamn! It's infuriating! Smiling is fine though; I don't mind smiling. Very good post.
agreed! smiles are contagious!
I never really thought about how I imitate the facial expressions of others. It's just something we're used to doing. It seems like it was an interesting article.
YES THIS IS SO TRUE.
all of those weird words like apprehensive or distraught can be seen in people's faces.
mad sad and glad are not the only emotions we have
I always knew women were better at interpreting emotions, but I think it's very interesting that they are able to identify specific emotions by imitating. Interesting!
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