Perceptual mechanisms underlying the embodiment of emotion

Beyond spoken words, social encounters involve covert non-verbal spontaneous communications including facial mimicry. Spontaneous facial mimicry has been implicated in healthy social functioning and emotion recognition ability, and is thought to do so via a process of emotion embodiment – the ‘offline’ reactivation of sensory and motor systems involved in the ‘online’ perception and production of an emotion. This thesis involved an exploration of the functional nature of embodied emotion simulation, specifically by looking at how perceptual factors influence when we engage in embodiment processes such as spontaneous facial mimicry. The project involved simultaneous recordings of electroencephalography (EEG) and facial electromyography (EMG) to examine the patterns of neural activity associated with spontaneous mimicry and emotion recognition ability. The collective results of the project suggest that early affective neural activity and facial muscle activity were modulated as a function of perceptual processing factors, particularly social relevance. However, there is a clear lack of association between neural affective and behavioural emotional levels of processing, suggesting that facial EMG recordings may not be sufficient to fully understand conditions modulating embodiment. The thesis goes on to demonstrate the utility and advantages of measuring neural affective processing in order to provide a clearer understanding of when and why we engage in spontaneous mimicry.