Mirroring Facial Expressions and Emotions in Dyadic Conversations

Mirroring Facial Expressions and Emotions in Dyadic Conversations Costanza Navarretta University of Copenhagen, Njalsgade 140, Copenhagen - Denmark costanza@hum.ku.dk Abstract This paper presents an investigation of mirroring facial expressions and the emotions which they convey in dyadic naturally occurring first encounters. Mirroring facial expressions are a common phenomenon in face-to-face interactions, and they are due to the mirror neuron system which has been found in both animals and humans. Researchers have proposed that the mirror neuron system is an important component behind many cognitive processes such as action learning and understanding the emotions of others. Preceding studies of the first encounters have shown that overlapping speech and overlapping facial expressions are very frequent. In this study, we want to determine whether the overlapping facial expressions are mirrored or are otherwise correlated in the encounters, and to what extent mirroring facial expressions convey the same emotion. The results of our study show that the majority of smiles and laughs, and one fifth of the occurrences of raised eyebrows are mirrored in the data. Moreover some facial traits in co-occurring expressions co-occur more often than it would be expected by chance. Finally, amusement, and to a lesser extent friendliness, are often emotions shared by both participants, while other emotions indicating individual affective states such as uncertainty and hesitancy are never showed by both participants, but co-occur with complementary emotions such as friendliness and support. Whether these tendencies are specific to this type of conversations or are more common should be investigated further. Keywords: Emotions, Multimodal Corpora, Mirroring 1. Introduction This paper deals with mirroring facial expressions and the emotions which they have been judged to convey (Navar- retta, 2014a) in an audio- and video-recorded corpus of dyadic first encounters (Paggio and Navarretta, 2011). More specifically, we want to determine to what extent the participants in the encounters mirror each others facial ex- pressions and which emotions these mirroring expressions show. The mirror neuron system which has been discovered in both animals and humans (Rizzolatti, 2005; Rizzolatti and Fabbri-Destro, 2008) is a mechanism according to which a particular group of neurons, the so-called mirror neu- rons, become active both when individuals perform a spe- cific motor act and when they observe a similar act done by others. Researchers have found that the mirror neuron system is central in many cognitive processes including ac- tion learning (di Pellegrino et al., 1992), the development of empathy (Gallese et al., 2004) and social skills (Dapretto et al., 2006). Mirroring body behaviours, and especially facial expres- sions, are common in social interactions and are important social cognitive mechanisms since they enable the observer to understand not only the goal of an observed motor act, but also the intention behind it (Rizzolatti, 2005; Rizzo- latti and Fabbri-Destro, 2008). Moreover, facial expres- sions are strong indicators of emotions together with the tone of voice and other body behaviours. It is important to understand how mirroring behaviours occur and what they indicate in different communicative situations as a first step …

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