| Resumo: | This thesis examines whether facial mimicry has an affiliative function beyond the epistemic function of facilitating emotion recognition. In one study assessing facial mimicry by FaceReader (N = 48) we found that facial mimicry is characterized by congruent (mirroring) and incongruent but complemental responses to emotional facial expressions, which are consistent with a relation-regulatory function. However, in a meta-analysis (k = 21; N = 1686), stronger mimicry of ingroup than outgroup members, a widely claimed indicator of an affiliative function, was only found for anger (with strong heterogeneity) but not for happiness, fear, disgust, or sadness. In our own laboratory research, three studies assessed facial mimicry by f-EMG, and how it is moderated by perceived threat. Perceived realistic intergroup threat was measured (N = 61) and experimentally induced (N = 78) to assess how facial mimicry varies in intergroup relations. Results showed that intergroup threat increased mimicry of ingroup but not of outgroup anger. However, when perceived ingroup threat was experimentally induced by ostracism (N = 80), results showed not threat effects on mimicry of ingroup anger, leaving the result of the previous two studies vulnerable to an alternative explanation of anger-mimicry regulation by the avoidance of conflict escalation rather than by an affiliative function. Overall, the reported results challenge classical claims of an affiliative function of mimicry. We conclude that mimicry might be in the service of affiliation because it facilitates emotion recognition, and that it is most probably sensitive to relation-regulatory concerns, however, the group-membership effects on mimicry provide no direct evidence for an affiliative function of mimicry.
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