Laughing at funerals and frowning at weddings: Top-down influences of context-driven social judgments on emotional mimicry

This research aimed to assess top-down effects of social judgments on (facial) emotional mimicry. Based on the mimicry as social regulator model (Hess & Fischer, 2013) and the notion that people can use emotion expressions as cues to an expresser's traits (Hareli & Hess, 2010), we predicted that participants judge expressers who show affectively deviant expressions more negatively, feel less close to them and, thus, show reduced mimicry. Participants saw smiles and sad expressions embedded in either a wedding or funeral scene (or neutral control). In Study 1, affectively deviant expressions were rated as inappropriate and led to less self-reported interpersonal closeness to the expresser.