http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/12/150505
Rapid mimicry and emotional contagion in domestic dogs
Abstract
Emotional
contagion is a basic form of empathy that makes individuals able to
experience others’ emotions. In human and non-human primates, emotional
contagion can be linked to facial mimicry, an automatic and fast
response (less than 1 s) in which individuals involuntary mimic others’
expressions. Here, we tested whether body (play bow, PBOW) and facial
(relaxed open-mouth, ROM) rapid mimicry is present in domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris)
during dyadic intraspecific play. During their free playful
interactions, dogs showed a stronger and rapid mimicry response (less
than 1 s) after perceiving PBOW and ROM (two signals typical of play in
dogs) than after perceiving JUMP and BITE (two play patterns resembling
PBOW and ROM in motor performance). Playful sessions punctuated by rapid
mimicry lasted longer that those sessions punctuated only by signals.
Moreover, the distribution of rapid mimicry was strongly affected by the
familiarity linking the subjects involved: the stronger the social
bonding, the higher the level of rapid mimicry. In conclusion, our
results demonstrate the presence of rapid mimicry in dogs, the
involvement of mimicry in sharing playful motivation and the social
modulation of the phenomenon. All these findings concur in supporting
the idea that a possible linkage between rapid mimicry and emotional
contagion (a building-block of empathy) exists in dogs.
1. Introduction
Rapid
mimicry is an involuntary, automatic and fast response (less than 1 s)
through which individuals mimic others’ expressions [1].
This phenomenon is grounded in the automatic Perception–Action coupling
of sensorimotor information that occurs in motor brain areas [2,3].
The discovery of mirror neurons in the premotor and parietal cortices
of monkeys provided the neurophysiological evidence of this coupling [4–6].
This set of neurons fires when a monkey performs an action and when it
observes a similar action performed by another individual [4].
Emotional contagion, a basic building-block of empathy, occurs when a subject shares the same affective state of another [1–3,7].
Although rapid mimicry and emotional contagion are distinct concepts,
because each can occur without the other, they may interact with each
other [7]. For instance, consolation [8–10]
is driven by emotional contagion experienced by the consoler in
response to victim anxiety, even without the involvement of mimicry.
However, certain forms of emotional contagion can be mediated by mimicry
[1–3].
In humans, the observation of facial expressions activates, similarly
to monkeys, shared motor representations not only in premotor and
parietal areas but also in insular and cingulate cortices, these latter
being directly involved in processing visceromotor sensations: a sort of
same face–same emotion process [11,12].
This process involves two steps. Firstly, the perception of others’
expressive behaviour automatically induces the observer to mimic such
behaviour. Secondly, the mimicry of others’ behaviour can induce the
observer to share the emotional state underpinning such behaviour [13].
From a behavioural perspective, humans show a higher latency to
emotionally respond to others’ facial expressions when they are unable
to mimic than when they are free to mimic the facial expressions
perceived [14].
Moreover, measures of facial electromyography revealed congruent,
greater and faster (less than 500 ms) facial muscle reactivity in human
subjects classified as ‘highly empathic’ when they were exposed to happy
and angry faces as stimuli. Accordingly, this highly empathic group of
human subjects also reacted with a corresponding experience of emotion.
By contrast, the group classified as ‘low empathic’ did not
differentiate between happy and angry stimuli with either facial muscles
or self-experience of emotion [15].
These findings support the hypothesis that rapid and automatically
evoked facial mimicry may be one of the mechanisms for the occurrence of
emotional contagion [15].
