Facial Mimicry As a Bottom-up Aid to Facial-Emotion Processing Is Strongly Dependent on Task, Emotion, and Saliency

To test the embodied simulation theory, we electromyographically measured facial mimicry (FM) to holistic- and featural-structured "angry" and "happy" faces. Although FM is considered symptomatic for all emotions, our findings suggest that FM uniquely facilitates the discrimination of ambiguous angry faces but not the recognition of salient or happy faces.