Influence of Psychological Closeness on Emotional Contagion: a focus on stress

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CHAPTER 1 
 
EMPATHY 
 
1. Empathy: definitions and usefulness 
 
The term empathy comes from the Ancient Greek word "εμπαθεία" (empatéia) which is 
composed by en (in) and pathos (feeling). In Ancient Greece, it was used to indicate the 
emotional relationship that connected the cantor and his public, while in European 
languages it appeared for the first time with the German word Einfühlung, coined by R. 
Vischer to indicate the over-identification with nature and symbols that occurs when we 
are in front of an art work. Only later, translated in the English language as empathy, it 
began to indicate the resonance of feelings between human beings (Enciclopedia Treccani 
online; Singer and Klimecki, 2014). 
In Psychology, many researchers have focused their attention on what empathy is and 
how it works, but still, there is not a universally accepted definition (de Vignemont and 
Signer, 2006). Following Singer and Klimecki (2014), we can shortly define it as the 
capacity to share the feelings of others. Through empathy we can resonate with the 
positive or negative emotion that we observe or imagine in another individual, and, 
importantly, this resonance is associated with the awareness that the source of our 
affective state is the other. This means, for example, that we can feel happy simply 
because we share the joy of someone else, but we know that what we are experiencing is
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the other person's emotion (Singer, Klimecki, 2014; Bernhardt and Singer, 2012, de 
Vignemont and Signer, 2006). So defined, empathy involves different components, such 
as emotional activation, affective sharing and self-other distinction and this allows us to 
distinguish it from other phenomena that are often wrongly mistaken for empathy, like 
cognitive perspective taking (“I just understand your state”, i.e. no emotional activation), 
compassion and sympathy (“I feel something for your state, but I don't feel the same”, 
meaning that “I am sorry because you are sad, but I don't feel sadness”, i.e. no affective 
sharing), mimicry or emotional contagion (“I share your emotion, but I am not aware that 
you are the source of it”, i.e. no self-other distinction) (Bernhardt and Singer, 2012; de 
Vignemont and Signer, 2006). In particular, emotional contagion is often referred to as 
primitive empathy (Hatfield et al., 2009) as it is present in many animal species and 
newborns, who don't have self-awareness, – 1-day old babies cry when they hear another 
baby crying. Higher traits of empathy can be found in animal species like dogs, monkeys 
or apes, which live in groups and are social animals (de Waal, 2002, 2009, 2010), but the 
full range of empathetic components is present only in humans, which have a unique 
complex social structure impossible to find in any other animal species. Many 
psychologists believe that it is the social ability to understand others that has supported 
the success of our species (Tomasello, 2000), however, it could be noticed that sharing 
others' emotions is not always a pleasant experience, especially when they have a negative 
relevance, as is the case of sadness, anger or pain; we could then ask why empathy has 
been selected during evolution. Why do we need empathy? 
De Vignemont and Signer (2006) propose that empathy has two main functions: 1. It 
allows us to quickly predict other's behaviours and actions because shared emotional brain 
networks activate related motivational and action systems. In other words, when we share
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the emotion of another person, we also share their emotional and motivational 
significance, and this provides a more direct and precise estimate of future actions. 2. 
Empathy furnishes knowledge about the environment around us. For instance, by 
recognizing fear in someone's face we assume that something scary is happening without 
having seen it ourselves. 
Certainly, empathy plays an important social role as it facilitates social communication, 
creates social coherence and generates affiliation and attachment (de Vignemont and 
Signer, 2006; Lakin and Chartrand, 2003). Moreover, it is related to moral sense, justice 
and cooperation (Hoffman, 2000; Eisenberg and Morris, 2001; Hume, 1978) and seems 
to be a key element for altruism and prosocial behaviour (Batson, 1991; Piliavin et al., 
1981, de Waal, 2008), even if there is no agreement on why we help others and which 
aspects of empathy are crucial to altruism and social behaviours (Waytz, Zaki and 
Mitchell, 2012; Hein et al., 2010). 
 
2. Recognizing emotions as a base to share them 
 
Once we have defined what empathy is and what its functions are, our next 
question is how does empathy occur? In the next paragraphs, we will try to give a 
first response to this question by introducing and describing systems and 
processes that are involved in the empathy experience. 
 
2.1 Mimicry and simulation
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Mimicry is the tendency to imitate the vocal, facial and postural expressions 
of people we are interacting with (Hess, Fischer, 2014; Hess et al., 1999). 
There is evidence that people tend to imitate a lot of stimuli (Hess, Fischer, 
2014), but in this work we will only focus on the mimicry of facial expressions 
and the role it plays in the detection and recognition of emotions.  
Hess and Fischer (2014) define four criteria for emotional mimicry. We 
can speak about emotional mimicry only when: 
1. Two people show the same non-verbal emotional expression; 
2. These expressions are time-locked and usually occur one after the other 
within one second; 
3. The mimicker’s expression depends on mimicked person’s expression; 
4. The mimicked expression represents a sharing of the original emotional 
display, not a reaction. 
Thus, for instance, we cannot speak about mimicry if two people smile at 
the same time as a reaction to a third stimulus, nor if two friends cry 
simultaneously, because they are speaking about something that make 
both feel sad.  
It has been proposed that emotional mimicry has two different functions 
(Hess and Fischer, 2014). The first function consists in providing 
affiliation (Hatfield, Cacioppo and Rapson, 1992), indeed mimicry helps 
people to regulate each other's emotions and to show support, pleasure and 
empathy. Moreover, it influences the quality of a relationship and people 
who synchronize their emotional expressions like each other more (Hess 
and Fischer, 2014). The second function, the one we are interested in, is
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understanding others' emotions. The basic idea is that, when the observer 
mimics the original emotional display, a feedback process begins and 
elicits the same emotional state in the observer, thus facilitating the 
emotion recognition process (Hess and Fischer, 2013). Many experiments 
show that when the facial muscles involved in emotional mimicry are 
blocked, the emotion recognition process is impaired. Oberman, 
Winkielman & Ramachandran (2007) found that blocking participants' 
facial muscles by asking them to bite a pen placed horizontally in their 
mouth impairs their ability to recognize happiness and to some extent 
disgust. Wood and colleagues (2015) provided evidence using a different 
manipulation: they asked their participants to apply a peel-off facial mask 
that dries within some minutes becoming stiff and tightening up facial 
actions. In this condition, participants performed a task that consisted of 
distinguishing target stimuli from similar distractors. The stimuli they 
used were images of a woman expressing morphed combinations of 
sadness and anger for the experimental condition and images of morphed 
combinations of a horse and a cow for the control condition. Results 
showed that participants wearing the facemask performed worse than the 
control group in discriminating facial expressions images, but not nonface 
stimuli. In another experiment by Rychlowska and colleagues (2014) 
participants were asked to rate the genuineness of true or false smiles while 
wearing a mouthguard or when allowed to freely move their facial 
muscles. Participants with blocked facial mimicry showed less capacity to 
judge if a smile was genuine or false. Interestingly, also botulin has been
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shown to compromise the ability to recognize emotions (Neal & 
Chartrand, 2011). 
An accurate model of the process that leads from the simulation of emotion 
to its recognition is proposed by Wood and colleagues (2016) and 
presented in the figure below. 
 
 
 
When the perceiver observes a fearful face (A) the visual percept activates the 
motor control areas generating a sensorimotor simulation (with or without 
mimicry) (B). The motor areas, in turn, activate other brain regions involved 
in fear (C) and this results in a cognitive, behavioural or psychological 
response (D) or in a simulation of it (E). This partial activation of the fear state 
allows the perceiver to understand which emotion the expresser is feeling. In 
addition, the sensorimotor simulation influences the clarity of the visual 
percept (F); simulation (G) and emotional responses (H) to an emotional