The sensations in the body such as "hungry" and "heart pounding" are called "internal receptive sensations" and are thought to be deeply involved in recognizing one's emotions.
So far, it has been suggested that people who are insensitive to internal receptive sensations are less likely to notice their emotions, but how these individual differences in internal receptive sensations perceive the emotions of others rather than themselves. It was not revealed if he was involved.
This time, researchers at Musashino University, Kansai University, Kyoto University, and the University of Tokyo have voluntarily imitated facial expressions (for example, smiles of others), where the sensitivity of internal acceptance is thought to be related to empathy for others. We predicted that it would be related to the likelihood of laughing at the university, and conducted an experiment with 15 Japanese people aged 57 to 80 years.
In this experiment, how accurately you can feel your heartbeat activity is an index of "accuracy of internal receptive sensation", and the number of times facial expression imitation occurs when you see someone else's smile is an index of "probability of facial expression imitation". And investigated the relationship between the two.As a result, it was clarified that the more accurate the internal receptive sensation, the more likely the facial expression imitation occurs.
In addition, regardless of the sense of internal acceptance, automatic facial expression imitation was more likely to occur when looking at another person who smiled with eye contact than when looking at another person who looked away and smiled. It was also found that the degree to which contact imitates facial expressions correlates with individual differences in internal receptive sensation.In other words, for the first time in the world, it is shown that a person who has an accurate internal receptive sensation and who is more likely to notice the sensation in the body is more likely to imitate facial expressions and is more sensitive to eye contact, which is a socially important signal such as interpersonal relationships. Was done.
This result shows that facial expression imitation related to sociality may be based on the sensation in the body called internal receptive sensation, and provides important findings supporting the hypothesis that "human sociality is rooted in the body". Giving.
Paper information:[Scientific Reports] Interoception is associated with the impact of eye contact on spontaneous facial mimicry
