Empathy in context: role of a subliminal priming task on Rapid Facial Reactions for specific emotions

Empathy is the ability to understand the emotions and feelings of others and is implicated in prosocial altruistic behavior (Decety, 2011). Recent works on emotion perception showed relations between Rapid Facial Reactions (RFRs) and empathy (Sonnby-Borgstrom, 2002; 2003; Dimberg, 2012). These studies have shown that the high empathy-subject have a higher degree of mimicking behavior than the low-empathy subjects (Sonnby-Borgstrom, 2002,2003). Authors considered mimicry reaction as a rapid and automatic component involved in the process leading to emotional empathy (Basch, 1983). The present study investigates relation between RFRs and empathy in the context of emotion perception, and more specifically emotional processes underlying emotional empathy. We present an experimental study that investigates the impact of emotional priming on RFRs. We used a subliminal affective priming task to unconsciously manipulate the emotional context. Participants were observing static human facial expressions (1500ms) (KDEF database, Lundqvist et al. 1998) of joy, fear, anger, sadness and neutral faces. Each facial expression was preceded by a parafoveal subliminal (90ms) word: JOY, FEAR, ANGER, SADNESS, and NEUTRAL. Four muscles (frontalis, corrugator, zygomaticus and depressor) were recorded by facial electromyography (EMG). Participants completed empathy questionnaires (IRI, Davis, 1983) before the experiment. For depressor activity (implicated in sadness), results show a correlation between empathy and RFRs, in specific condition of perception. When participants are exposed to neutral faces preceded by subliminal word SADNESS, the higher empathy score the participants have,greater the sadness RFRs (depressor) are. Results also suggest that when participants perceive neutral faces, emotional cues from the context of perception are more relevant for the high-empathy subjects than low-empathy subjects. Results are consistent with appraisal theory which considers RFRs as emotional response and consequence of emotional processing. More than mimicry, results suggest that empathy can be considered as an emotional reaction to emotional state of others, taking into account context of perception.