Being mimicked affects inhibitory mechanisms of imitation
- Author(s)
- Birgit Rauchbauer, Robin Dunbar, Claus Lamm
- Abstract
This study investigated the effects of being mimicked on automatic imitation indices and social cohesion. 180 female participants were either interactively mimicked or anti-mimicked. In the mimicry condition, a confederate topographically aligned, during anti-mimicry, misaligned, their behavior to the participants. Being mimicked may evoke a sense of overlap between self and other generated movements. This so-created self-other overlap may generalize to other forms of imitation and social cohesion. Here, we investigated the effects of being mimicked on automatic imitation indices, using the Imitation-Inhibition Task. These indices are the baseline corrected facilitation and inhibition index, and the interference index which depicts the relation between facilitation and inhibition. In case of a generalized self-other overlap, we expect an increase in the facilitation, inhibition, and interference index, after the Mimicry as compared to the Anti-Mimicry condition. We furthermore predicted that the modulation of the indices would predict higher social cohesion ratings. Yet, our results showed a lower inhibition index after being mimicked, respectively an increase after Anti-Mimicry, with no effects on social cohesion ratings. This suggests that potential self-other overlap after being mimicked does not generalize to automatic imitation indices. Instead, being mimicked may have increased self-regulatory processes, and task performance.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Cognition, Emotion, and Methods in Psychology, Vienna Cognitive Science Hub
- External organisation(s)
- Aix-Marseille Université, University of Oxford
- Journal
- Acta Psychologica
- Volume
- 209
- No. of pages
- 10
- ISSN
- 0001-6918
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2020.103132
- Publication date
- 09-2020
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 501021 Social psychology
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
- Portal url
- https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/being-mimicked-affects-inhibitory-mechanisms-of-imitation(7a55cfb4-a64e-4bd0-b20b-1391321600b9).html