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When does mimicry affect evaluative judgment?
Francesco Foroni1, Gün R Semin
1Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands. F.Foroni@uu.nl
Abstract:
We investigated the effect of subliminally presented happy or angry faces on evaluative judgments when the facial muscles of participants were free to mimic or blocked. We hypothesized and showed that subliminally presented happy expressions lead to more positive judgments of cartoons compared to angry expressions only when facial muscles were not blocked. These results reveal the influence of socially driven embodied processes on affective judgments and have also potential implications for phenomena such as emotional contagion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).
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