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Emotion concepts are important. They help us to understand, experience and predict human behaviour. Emotion concepts also link the realm of the abstract with the realm of bodily experience and actions. Accordingly, the key question is how such concepts are created, represented and used. Embodied cognition theories hold that concepts are grounded in neural systems that produce experiential and motor states. Concepts are also contextually situated and thus engage sensorimotor resources in a dynamic, flexible way. Finally, on that framework, conceptual understanding unfolds in time, reflecting embodied as well as linguistic and cultural influences. In this article, we review empirical work on emotion concepts and show how it highlights their grounded, yet dynamic and context-sensitive nature. The conclusions are consistent with recent developments in embodied cognition that allow concepts to be linked to sensorimotor systems, yet be flexibly sensitive to current representational and action needs. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain’.

This review explores spontaneous mimicry in the context of three questions. The first question concerns the role of spontaneous mimicry in processing conceptual information. The second question concerns the debate whether spontaneous mimicry is driven by simple associative processes or reflects higher-order processes such as goals, intentions, and social context. The third question addresses the implications of these debates for understanding atypical individuals and states. We review relevant literature and argue for a dynamic, context-sensitive role of spontaneous mimicry in social cognition and behavior. We highlight how the modulation of mimicry is often adaptive but also point out some cases of maladaptive modulations that impair an individuals’ engagement in social life.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of emotion, personality, and social cognition have drawn much attention in recent years, with high-profile studies frequently reporting extremely high (e.g., >.8) correlations between brain activation and personality measures. We show that these correlations are higher than should be expected given the (evidently limited) reliability of both fMRI and personality measures. The high correlations are all the more puzzling because method sections rarely contain much detail about how the correlations were obtained. We surveyed authors of 55 articles that reported findings of this kind to determine a few details on how these correlations were computed. More than half acknowledged using a strategy that computes separate correlations for individual voxels and reports means of only those voxels exceeding chosen thresholds. We show how this nonindependent analysis inflates correlations while yielding reassuring-looking scattergrams. This analysis technique was used to obtain the vast majority of the implausibly high correlations in our survey sample. In addition, we argue that, in some cases, other analysis problems likely created entirely spurious correlations. We outline how the data from these studies could be reanalyzed with unbiased methods to provide accurate estimates of the correlations in question and urge authors to perform such reanalyses. The underlying problems described here appear to be common in fMRI research of many kinds--not just in studies of emotion, personality, and social cognition.

Trust is foundational for social relations. Current psychological models focus on specific evaluative and descriptive content underlying initial impressions of trustworthiness. Two experiments investigated whether trust also depends on subjective consistency—a sense of fit between elements. Experiment 1 examined how consistency of simple verbal characterizations influences trust judgments. Experiment 2 examined how incidental visual consistency impacts trust judgments and economic decisions reflecting trust. Both experiments show that subjective consistency positively and uniquely predicts trust judgments and economic behavior. Critically, subjective consistency is a unique predictor of trust that is irreducible to the content of individual elements, either on the dimension of trust or the dimension of valence. These results show that trust impressions are not a simple sum of the contributing parts, but reflect a “gestalt”. The results fit current frameworks emphasizing the role of predictive coding and coherence in social cognition.

Many consider moral decisions to follow an internal “moral compass”, resistant to social pressures. Here we examine how social influence shapes moral decisions under risk, and how it operates in different decision contexts. We employed an adapted Asian Disease Paradigm where participants chose between certain losses/gains and probabilistic losses/gains in a series of moral (lives) or financial (money) decisions. We assessed participants’ own risk preferences before and after exposing them to social norms that are generally risk-averse or risk-seeking. Our results showed that participants robustly shifted their own choices towards the observed risk preferences. This conformity holds even after a re-testing in three days. Interestingly, in the monetary domain, risk-averse norms have more influence on choices in the loss frame, whereas risk-seeking norms have more influence in the gain frame, presumably because norms that contradict default behavior are most informative. In the moral domain, risk-averse as opposed to risk-seeking norms are more effective in the loss frame but in the gain frame different norms are equally effective. Taken together, our results demonstrate conformity in risk preferences across contexts and highlight unique features of decisions and conformity in moral and monetary domains.

Blocking facial mimicry can disrupt recognition of emotion stimuli. Many previous studies have focused on facial expressions, and it remains unclear whether this generalises to other types of emotional expressions. Furthermore, by emphasizing categorical recognition judgments, previous studies neglected the role of mimicry in other processing stages, including dimensional (valence and arousal) evaluations. In the study presented herein, we addressed both issues by asking participants to listen to brief non-verbal vocalizations of four emotion categories (anger, disgust, fear, happiness) and neutral sounds under two conditions. One of the conditions included blocking facial mimicry by creating constant tension on the lower face muscles, in the other condition facial muscles remained relaxed. After each stimulus presentation, participants evaluated sounds’ category, valence, and arousal. Although the blocking manipulation did not influence emotion recognition, it led to higher valence ratings in a non-category-specific manner, including neutral sounds. Our findings suggest that somatosensory and motor feedback play a role in the evaluation of affect vocalizations, perhaps introducing a directional bias. This distinction between stimulus recognition, stimulus categorization, and stimulus evaluation is important for understanding what cognitive and emotional processing stages involve somatosensory and motor processes.

Sensorimotor models suggest that understanding the emotional content of a face recruits a simulation process in which a viewer partially reproduces the facial expression in their own sensorimotor system. An important prediction of these models is that disrupting simulation should make emotion recognition more difficult. Here we used electroencephalogram (EEG) and facial electromyogram (EMG) to investigate how interfering with sensorimotor signals from the face influences the real-time processing of emotional faces. EEG and EMG were recorded as healthy adults viewed emotional faces and rated their valence. During control blocks, participants held a conjoined pair of chopsticks loosely between their lips. During interference blocks, participants held the chopsticks horizontally between their teeth and lips to generate motor noise on the lower part of the face. This noise was confirmed by EMG at the zygomaticus. Analysis of EEG indicated that faces expressing happiness or disgust—lower face expressions—elicited larger amplitude N400 when they were presented during the interference than the control blocks, suggesting interference led to greater semantic retrieval demands. The selective impact of facial motor interference on the brain response to lower face expressions supports sensorimotor models of emotion understanding.

The spontaneous mimicry of others' emotional facial expressions constitutes a rudimentary form of empathy and facilitates social understanding. Here, we show that human participants spontaneously match facial expressions of an android physically present in the room with them. This mimicry occurs even though these participants find the android unsettling and are fully aware that it lacks intentionality. Interestingly, a video of that same android elicits weaker mimicry reactions, occurring only in participants who find the android \"humanlike.\" These findings suggest that spontaneous mimicry depends on the salience of humanlike features highlighted by face-to-face contact, emphasizing the role of presence in human-robot interaction. Further, the findings suggest that mimicry of androids can dissociate from knowledge of artificiality and experienced emotional unease. These findings have implications for theoretical debates about the mechanisms of imitation. They also inform creation of future robots that effectively build rapport and engagement with their human users.

Conscious feelings have traditionally been viewed as a central and necessary ingredient of emotion. Here we argue that emotion also can be genuinely unconscious. We describe evidence that positive and negative reactions can be elicited subliminally and remain inaccessible to introspection. Despite the absence of subjective feelings in such cases, subliminally induced affective reactions still influence people's preference judgments and even the amount of beverage they consume. This evidence is consistent with evolutionary considerations suggesting that systems underlying basic affective reactions originated prior to systems for conscious awareness. The idea of unconscious emotion is also supported by evidence from affective neuroscience indicating that subcortical brain systems underlie basic \"liking\" reactions. More research is needed to clarify the relations and differences between conscious and unconscious emotion, and their underlying mechanisms. However, even under the current state of knowledge, it appears that processes underlying conscious feelings can become decoupled from processes underlying emotional reactions, resulting in genuinely unconscious emotion.