Emotional Empathy and Facial Reactions to Facial Expressions

U. Dimberg et al.: Emotional Empathy and Facial Reactions to FacialE xpressionsJournal of Psychophysiology 2011; Vol. 25(1):26–31Hogrefe Publishing

Article

Emotional Empathy and FacialReactions to Facial Expressions

Ulf Dimberg, Per Andréasson, and Monika Thunberg

Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, Sweden

Abstract. This study investigates whether people high in emotional empathy are more facially reactive than are people low in emotionalempathy when exposed to pictures of angry and happy facial expressions. Facial electromyographic activity was measured from thecorrugator and the zygomatic muscle regions. In accordance with the predictions, the high empathic group reacted with larger corrugatoractivity to angry as compared to happy faces and with larger zygomatic activity to happy faces. However, the low empathic group didnot differentiate between the angry and happy stimuli at all. The high empathic group, as compared to the low empathic group, also ratedthe angry faces as expressing more anger and the happy faces as being happier. It is concluded that high empathic people are particularlysensitive in reacting with facial reactions to facial expressions and that this ability is accompanied by a higher level of empathic accuracy.

Keywords: empathy, emotion, facial expressions, facial reactions, facial EMG, emotional accuracy

Empathy plays a fundamental role in social life and emo-tional interactions. The ability to recognize and/or to shareanother person’s emotion is one important aspect of empa-thy. There is no single definition of empathy but it has beensuggested that the ability to accurately detect the emotionalinformation transmitted by another person (e.g., Levenson,1996) would be one fundamental aspect included in thedefinition of empathy. That is, if we do not accurately per-ceive the emotions of another person it would be difficultto empathetically react to or share that person’s feelings.This ability has been termed empathic accuracy (for a re-view see Ickes, 1997).

It has also been proposed that one aspect of empathy isthe ability to react emotionally to the emotional expressionsof other persons (e.g., MacDonald, 2003). The ability foremotional communication has an evolutionary basis andincludes a biologically based predisposition in both senderand receiver (Buck & Ginsburg, 1997; Darwin, 1872; Dim-berg, 1990; Preston & de Waal, 2002). Emotional commu-nication and empathic reactions are developed early (e.g.,Eisenberg, Murphy, & Shepard, 1997). One manifestationof this is when newborn children start crying when theyhear another child crying (Simner, 1971). There also seemsto be an inherent tendency to imitate another person’s facialactions. Newborns can imitate both different facial gesturesand specific facial expressions (Field, Woodson, Green-berg, & Cohen, 1982; Meltzhoff & Moore, 1977). Mimick-ing behavior has also been found in adults in response topictures of emotional facial expressions (e.g., Dimberg,1982, 1990). For instance, when subjects were exposed tohappy and angry pictures of facial expressions they tendedto react with increased facial electromyographic (EMG) ac-

tivity in muscles that correspond to the facial stimuli. Hap-py faces evoked increased zygomatic muscle activitywhereas angry faces evoked increased corrugator muscleactivity. The zygomatic muscle elevates the cheeks into asmile whereas the corrugator muscle wrinkles the eye-brows in a negative expression (e.g., Hjortsjö, 1970). It hasbeen found that similar corresponding reaction patterns canbe evoked in spite of the fact that subjects are unconscious-ly exposed to the happy and the angry faces (Dimberg,Thunberg, & Elmehed, 2000). This indicates that empathicreactions can be controlled not only by conscious cognitiveprocesses but also by automatic/unconscious processes(e.g., Dimberg et al., 2000; Hodges & Wegner, 1997).

It has further been proposed that the tendency to mimicanother person’s facial expression may be a key for empa-thy to occur because the facial muscles function as a feed-back system for a person’s own experience of emotion(Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994; MacDonald, 2003;Meltzhoff & Decety, 2003). For a review of the facial feed-back hypothesis see, e.g., Adelmann and Zajonc (1989).Thus, when the receiver reacts in a corresponding way tothe facial display of the sender, feedback from these facialreactions will induce a similar emotion in the receiver,which consequently will culminate in empathy. According-ly it has been found that people can react both expressively(e.g., Dimberg, 1982; McHugo, Lanzetta, Sullivan, Mas-ters, & Englis, 1985; Vaughan & Lanzetta, 1980; for re-views see Hatfield et al., 1994, and Davis, 1994) and witha corresponding experience of emotion (Dimberg, 1990;Lundquist & Dimberg, 1995) when exposed to another per-son’s emotional display. It is further interesting that peoplewho rated high as compared to low in empathy, at least for

DOI: 10.1027/0269-8803/a000029DOI: 10.1027/0269-8803/a000029

© 2011 Federation of European Psychophysiology Societies

Journal of Psychophysiology 2011; Vol. 25(1):26–31 Hogrefe Publishing

very short exposure times, tend to react more intensely tofacial stimuli (Sonnby-Borgström, 2002). Particularly,Wiesenfeld, Whitman, and Malatesta (1984) found thatwomen scoring high in empathy were more likely to re-spond with a corresponding facial expression when ex-posed to videotaped scenes of smiling and crying infants.

Thus, it has been found that facial EMG reactions seem tomirror the face to which people are exposed (e.g., Dimberg,1982; Lundquist & Dimberg, 1995) and these results may betaken as support for the hypothesis that motor mimicry is onemechanism behind emotional and empathic contagion (Ba-velas, Black, Lemery, & Mullett, 1986; Hatfield et al., 1994;Lundquist & Dimberg, 1995). The aim of the present studywas to explore whether emotional empathy is related to thecapacity to react with facial reactions to facial expressions ofanother person. People classified as high in emotional empa-thy were exposed to pictures of happy and angry faces whiletheir facial electromyographic (EMG) activity was detectedfrom the zygomatic and corrugator muscles. A number ofearlier studies (e.g., Dimberg, 1982, 1990; Dimberg & Pet-terson, 2000; Dimberg et al., 2000) have shown that a sensi-tive measure to detect positive facial reactions to facial stim-uli is to compare the zygomatic muscle response to happyfaces with the response to angry control faces. Similarly, anegative reaction can be detected by comparing the corruga-tor muscle response to angry faces with the response to happycontrol faces. Thus, based on earlier findings it was expectedthat happy as compared to angry faces should induce largerzygomatic muscle activity whereas angry as compared tohappy faces should induce larger corrugator muscle activity.Because it was expected that high empathic participantsshould be more reactive to facial expressions, it was predictedthat the differential responding between angry and happy fac-es should be particularly pronounced in the high empathicgroup.

As noted above, one important aspect in empathy is theability to accurately detect the emotional information dis-played by another person. Even if different results havebeen obtained when different types of empathy have beenrelated to the ability to make interpersonal judgments (e.g.,Davis, 1994) some studies have demonstrated that emo-tional empathy is related to the accuracy of identifying fa-cial expressions (Riggio, Tucker, & Coffaro, 1989). Onecould argue that one aspect of empathic accuracy is, notonly to be able to correctly identify different facial expres-sions, but also to be more sensitive to the emotional contentof the stimuli. This could further be manifested in a moreintense experience of the emotional expression. Conse-quently, in the present study 48 participants of the totalselected group (N = 144) of the high and low empathicparticipants were asked to rate the happy and angry facialstimuli to which they had been exposed during the EMGrecording phase. Because people high in empathy can beexpected to be more sensitive to the emotional content ofthe stimuli, the High empathic group was predicted to ratehappy faces as more happy and angry faces as more angrycompared to the Low empathic group.

Method

Participants

The participants were 144 students (72 males and 72 fe-males) attending courses at Uppsala University. Theirmean age was 22.3 years (SD = 2.8). The subjects werepaid about US $10.00.

Questionnaire

To measure emotional empathy, a Swedish translation(Dimberg, 2010) of the Questionnaire Measure of Emo-tional Empathy (QMEE) developed by Mehrabian and Ep-stein (1972) was used. For a review of available empathymeasures see Chlopan, McCain, Carbonell, and Hagen(1985). According to Chlopan et al. the QMEE has ade-quate validity. The internal consistency of the Swedishtranslation of the questionnaire as well as the test-retestreliability is also fairly good (Dimberg, 2010). In the Amer-ican original as well as in the Swedish translation, femalesscore significantly higher (Dimberg, 2010; Mehrabian &Epstein, 1972). This means that if only a limited numberof the highest scoring individuals are selected or if a groupis divided based on an overall median split, most of themwould be females (Dimberg, 2010). Consequently, to avoidthis confounding problem with gender when participantswere selected in the present study, males and females wereseparately selected, resulting in an equal number of malesand females in the respective high and low empathy groups.According to Davis (1994) the overall difference betweenmales and females could be explained in the light of differ-ent gender roles that become particularly apparent in self-report scales (Eisenberg & Lennon, 1983). The participantswere selected from a larger sample (N > 500) who earlierhad completed the QMEE questionnaire and, based on theirscores, the 72 highest and the 72 lowest ranked studentswere selected into a High and a Low group, which wererecruited and tested in the laboratory. Their scores corre-sponded to the 30th highest, respectively, lowest percentilescores (Dimberg, 2010).

Stimuli and Procedure

Following a standard procedure (e.g., Dimberg, 1990) thesubjects were individually tested while seated in a comfort-able chair in a sound-attenuated laboratory room. Theywere exposed to slides of facial expressions projected ontoa screen about 1.5 m in front of them with a picture size of25 × 35 cm. Six happy and six angry faces were selectedfrom Ekman and Friesen’s Pictures of Facial Affect (1976).The stimulus duration was 5 s with intertrial intervals of25–35 s. The exposure time and intertrial intervals werecontrolled by Contact Precision Instruments (CPI) hard-

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Hogrefe Publishing Journal of Psychophysiology 2011; Vol. 25(1):26–31

ware and software. Similar to earlier studies (e.g., Dimberg,1990), the participants were exposed to six consecutivepresentations of one picture of a happy face and one pictureof an angry face. Different participants saw different com-binations of the slides, and the order of the stimulus cate-gories was counterbalanced across participants. Note thateven if different subjects saw different combinations of theslides the High and the Low empathic groups were, overall,exposed to identical facial stimuli.

Following a standardized instruction procedure, the par-ticipants were told that their physiological activity was go-ing to be measured while they were exposed to slides ofdifferent faces. In order to conceal the fact that their facialmuscle activity was being measured, a cover story wasused. The participants were told that sweat gland activitywas measured in their faces (e.g., Dimberg, 1982, 1990).When interviewed after the experiment, none of the partic-ipants reported that they were aware of the fact that theirfacial muscle activity had been measured. After the inter-view, the participants were told the true purpose of the ex-periment.

Apparatus and Data Scoring

The facial EMG activity was measured following a stand-ard procedure (e.g., Dimberg et al., 2000). That is, Ag/AgClminiature electrodes were filled with electrode paste andwere bipolarly attached to the left zygomatic and corruga-tor muscle regions (Fridlund & Cacioppo, 1986). The leftmuscle regions were chosen because earlier research hasrevealed that the facial muscle reactions from the left sideare more distinct compared to the right side (e.g., Dimberg& Petterson, 2000). To reduce the electrode-site impedancethe skin was cleaned with alcohol and rubbed with elec-trode paste. The raw EMG signals were measured with CPIamplifiers, band pass filtered from 10 to 1000 Hz, and werefurther analyzed with contour-following integrators with atime constant of 20 ms. The integrated signals were digi-tized by a 12-bit analog-to-digital converter. This signalwas stored on a personal computer with a sampling fre-quency of 100 Hz. The facial EMG data were scored andaveraged during the 5 s exposure. Facial reactions were ex-pressed as change in activity in microvolts between the pre-stimulus levels, which was defined as the mean activityduring the last second before stimulus onset.

Ratings

To measure if emotional empathy is related to how intense-ly the participants experienced the emotional content of thestimuli, the last 48 arriving participants to the laboratorywere asked to immediately after the EMG recording phaserate the angry and happy faces to which they had been ex-posed. These 48 subjects were selected under identical con-ditions from the same student population as the remaining

96 participants and comprised 24 subjects high and 24 lowin empathy with an equal number of males and females.The scales (angry and happy) ranged from 0 (not at all) to9 (very much). The participants were instructed to give theirpersonal opinion of how intensely they experienced the ex-pressions and that there was no right or wrong way to ratethe stimuli.

Design and Statistical Analysis

Before analysis the facial EMG data were collapsed overthe respective six trials and the data were Z-transformed.Separate ANOVAs were performed for each muscle region.Consequently the basic design was a two-factorial withGroup (High vs. Low in empathy) as the between-subjectsfactor and Emotion (Angry vs. Happy face) as the repeatedmeasure factor. A priori t-tests were used to specificallycompare differences between happy and angry faces.

The rating data were analyzed in separate ANOVAs withGroup as the between-subjects factor and Emotion as thewithin-subjects factor. A priori t-tests were used to specif-ically compare differences in ratings between groups.

Results

Facial EMG

The mean data for the zygomatic muscle are presented inthe left panel of Figure 1. Happy as compared to angryfaces tended to evoke overall larger zygomatic activity,F(1, 142) = 3.49, MSe = .91, p < .10. However, as can beseen in Figure 1 and as indicated by the Group × Emotioninteraction, F(1, 142) = 6.43, MSe = .91, p < .05, it wasonly the High empathic group that differentiated betweenthe angry and happy stimuli, t(142) = 3.11, p < .05, whereasthe Low group did not, t < 1.

The mean data for the corrugator muscle are presentedin the right panel in Figure 1. Angry as compared to happyfaces evoked overall larger corrugator muscle activity,F(1, 142) = 4.33, MSe = .95, p < .05. However, as can beseen in Figure 1 and as indicated by the Group × Emotioninteraction, F(1, 142) = 5.34, MSe = .95, p < .05, it wasonly the High empathic group that differentiated in re-sponding between happy and angry faces, t(142) = 3.10, p< .05, whereas the Low empathic group did not, t < 1.

Ratings

The mean data for the anger and happiness ratings are pre-sented in Table 1.

Angry faces were overall rated as expressing more an-ger, F(1, 46) = 574.19, MSe = 1.44, p < .05, and happy facesas more happiness, F(1, 46) = 1273.02, MSe = .97, p < .05.

28 U. Dimberg et al.: Emotional Empathy and Facial Reactions to Facial Expressions


Self-evidently, this was an effect of the stimulus faces beingselected in order to express anger and happiness, respec-tively (Ekman & Friesen, 1976). In spite of the fact that theGroup × Emotion factor did not reach significance for ei-ther anger or happiness ratings (F values < 2.6), as predict-ed, a priori t-tests showed that the High as compared to theLow empathic group rated the angry face as more angry,t(46) = 2.32, p < .05 (see Table 1). Furthermore, also aspredicted and as can be seen in Table 1, the High as com-pared to the Low empathic group rated the happy faces asexpressing more happiness, t(46) = 1.71, p < .05.

Discussion

Consistent with earlier studies, happy faces tended to, over-all, evoke larger zygomatic activity than did angry faceswhereas angry faces evoked larger corrugator activity (e.g.,Dimberg, 1982). Interestingly, the Group × Emotion inter-actions for both the corrugator and the zygomatic muscleregions indicated that the groups differed in this pattern ofresponding.

In accordance with the predictions, the High empathicgroup reacted with larger corrugator activity to angry ascompared to happy faces and with larger zygomatic activityto happy faces. However, the Low empathic group did notdifferentiate between the angry and happy stimuli at all.Consequently, these data convincingly show that people

scoring high in emotional empathy react in accordancewith the emotional expressions of other persons while peo-ple low in empathy do not. These results are consistent withsome earlier findings (e.g., Wiesenfeld et al., 1984) indi-cating, for instance, that high empathic people are morelikely to respond with corresponding facial expressionswhen exposed to smiling faces. Consequently, the presentstudy demonstrates that empathy is related to the capacityto react with facial EMG reactions to facial expressions andthat this ability is particularly evident for people high inemotional empathy.

Note that it is not self-evident that the present effectsshould be interpreted solely in terms of mimicking behav-ior. That is, it could also be the case that the high empathicgroup react more intensely with a positive and a negativeemotional response to the respective positive and negativefacial stimuli. For instance, if people react with an in-creased zygomatic response to happy faces this may reflecta mimicking response but it could also be that they reactwith a positive emotional response that initially is inde-pendent of mimicking behavior. Even if it is difficult and/orperhaps impossible to make a pure distinction betweenthese two interpretations, it is interesting to note that earlierresearch (e.g., Lundquist & Dimberg, 1995) have demon-strated that both these response tendencies may simulta-neously be reflected in facial reactions. For instance, Lund-quist and Dimberg exposed subjects to different facial ex-pressions of emotion and measured facial reactions fromseveral different facial muscles as well as the experienceof emotion. They found that complex response patternswere elicited which could be interpreted as reflecting bothone component of mimicking behavior and one componentof a positive/negative emotional response. In parallel tothose results one could interpret the present data as, at leastpartly, reflecting mimicking behavior.

Because the Low empathic group did not differentiatebetween the angry and happy faces, one could question ifthis fact reflects an inability in this group to both mimicand to react emotionally to facial stimuli. Contrary to the

Figure 1. The mean facial EMG response (± SE) to angry and happy faces for high and low empathic groups for thezygomatic major muscle (left panel) and the corrugator supercilii muscle (right panel).

Table 1. Mean ratings of angry and happy faces for the high(n = 24) and low (n = 24) empathy groups (stand-ard errors within parenthesis)

Angry faces Happy faces

High Low High Low

Anger 6.5* (0.39) 5.7 (0.26) 0.2 (0.13) 0.2 (0.08)

Happiness 0.3 (0.10) 0.4 (0.42) 7.7* (0.24) 7.3 (0.24)

Note. *significant difference between high and low groups.



Low empathic group, the High empathic group clearly dif-ferentiated between the angry and happy faces. One could,therefore, question whether this ability is specifically asso-ciated with high empathy and that the inability to respondis associated with low empathy. One way to explore thisquestion would be to include a group scoring intermediatein empathy between the two extreme groups. In that way itwould be possible to find out if the ability to respond tofacial stimuli is specifically associated with high empathyonly, or if the intermediate group also react to facial stimuli,which would support the hypothesis that low empathy isassociated with an inability to respond to facial stimuli.

One could further question if the ability to react to facialstimuli in the High empathic group rather reflects a generalability to react to stimuli with negative and positive va-lence. One way to explore this question would be to useother types of emotional stimuli with negative and positivevalence, instead of facial stimuli, when comparing high andlow empathic groups.

Surprisingly, the Low empathic group did not even tendto differentiate between the angry and happy faces in facialmuscle responding. One could, therefore, question whetherthe Low empathic group could discriminate at all betweenthe stimuli. However, even if the rating data are not basedon all participants in the present study, the rating data col-lected from the smaller subset clearly reveal that the Lowgroup differentiated between the happy and angry faces inthe same direction as did the High empathic group. Impor-tantly, however, the results also demonstrated that the Highempathic group showed a better empathic accuracy in thesense that they rated the happy faces as more intense inhappiness and the angry faces as more angry than did theLow group. In that sense the present results are consistentwith earlier studies showing that empathy was related tothe accuracy of identifying facial expressions (Riggio et al.,1989).

Finally, although the focus of the present study was notgender differences, some earlier studies in which facialEMG has been measured (Dimberg & Lundquist, 1990;Schwartz, Brown, & Ahern, 1980) indicate that femalesmay be more facially expressive than males. In order tocheck if gender difference is a reliable effect, we thereforeincluded gender as a factor in a follow-up analysis. Theresults from this follow-up analysis did not indicate anyoverall gender effect and/or interaction effects with the em-pathy factor. This indicates that gender differences in facialEMG is not a reliable phenomenon and perhaps future stud-ies may explore under what circumstances gender differ-ences can be detected.

In summary, the present study showed that emotionalempathy is related to the capacity to react with facial reac-tions to happy and angry facial expressions and that thisability is particularly evident for people high in emotionalempathy. This superiority in facial reactions to facial stim-uli is accompanied by a higher level of empathic accuracyas indicated by higher intensity of emotional ratings of thehappy and the angry facial expressions.

Acknowledgment

This study was supported by grants to Ulf Dimberg fromThe Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation.

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Accepted for publication: May 18, 2010

Ulf Dimberg

Department of PsychologyUppsala UniversityBox 1225751 42 UppsalaSwedenTel. +46 18 471-0000Fax +46 18 471-2123E-mail [email protected]



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Emotional Empathy and Facial Reactions to Facial Expressions