Introduction Psychopathy is a personality disorder whose core diagnostic features include

Are mirror-touch synesthetes able to take on someone else’s emotional sensations? These are the questions that this study will aim to answer and a couple different experiments will be done to determine the answers. This study will be all observational research, trying to limit as many extraneous factors as possible. The first will be face perception tests. Subjects will be shown pictures of faces expressing different emotions and researcher’s will observe if the subjects’ emotions are changing as well. The next study will be with live people demonstrating different emotions to see if synesthetes can take on the emotions they are observing. There is some research to suggest that empathy is tied to mirror-touch synesthesia, and these tests will furthermore help determine that to be true or

Reevy (2010) hypothesized that there are five ways in which people demonstrate empathy. The first three are described as “primitive,” meaning they happen automatically, and include mimicry (copying someone else’s facial expressions and body movements), conditioning (feeling and showing the same emotions as someone else), and direct association (recalling when a similar situation happened to themselves). The last two are learned and require some practice. They include verbally mediated association (by reading or hearing something, one can visualize and feel the situation), and perspective taking (putting oneself in another person’s shoes) (Reevy, 2010). Additionally, Bruneau (2009) describes the three types of empathy as interactive (focused

Human empathy has homologous characteristics of both broadly and strictly congruent mirror neurons. Upon swift introspection, it is apparent that human empathy is not exclusively based in physical stimuli (i.e. strictly congruent), but is also emotionally based and invokes higher levels of thinking. When we are empathetic towards an other we surely consider the context and frame of reference surrounding a situation (i.e. broadly congruent) and integrate that with our perceptions of an individual, but in no ways could this complex task be reduced to a simple reflex. Emotion and as well as our own experiences are integral in creating the complex context that determine our level of empathetic processing.

Over the course of study, research has been done on the topic of Facial Feedback Hypothesis and there is evidence to support that there is a direct link between our facial activity and the expression of our emotions. The facial feedback hypothesis states that the nonverbal exhibition of facial muscles have a significant impact on emotional experiences (Zuckerman, Klorman, Larrance, & Spiegel, 1981). That is, the magnitude to which changes in a person’s emotional experience is altered depends on whether the facial muscles are strengthened or attenuated (Strack, Martin & Stepper, 1988). There are two facial muscles that is related to the inducing or dissuading of the expression of emotions. These are the Zygomaticus and the Corrugator supercilii

Although there seems to be some heritable component to empathy--identical twins, who have identical genes, show more similarity in their response to others ' distress than fraternal twins do--it can be twisted, warped or crushed like a fragile sprout. Empathy means, at heart, the ability to respond to another 's distress in a way more appropriate to her situation than to your own. "The development of empathy has a lot to do with how children experience emotions and how people respond to their emotional states," argues Berkowitz. "It 's not automatic." If a child 's sadness is met with stony silence rather than a hug, if her loneliness is met with continued abandonment,

This can be overt by how the person acts and talks or this can be covert by how the person thinks. It is rather difficult to assess mimicry on the covert scale so for this study overt mimicry was only assessed. To properly prove mimicry promotes empathy the researchers preformed two studies. The first study involved 15 students that were blind to the purpose of the study. They watched a video of a woman talking about her classes. While this was happening researchers watched the audience’s behavior and recorded the times an individual copied the woman’s behavior. At the end of the video the participants read a scenario where a woman was rape. After they finished reading they were informed the woman in the scenario is the same as the woman in the video. With this knowledge they were asked to complete a survey to determine how much the woman was at fault for being raped. The results showed that the more an individual mimicked the woman the less they blamed her for the being raped. Also though this study already proves mimicry promotes empathy, the researchers wanted to do a second study to see if this can be

Moreover, awareness of the relevance of facial expression was eradicated through the use of a diversionary story about needing to measure facial muscular activity. The diversion was substantiated by placing surface electrodes on certain parts of the face such as between the eyebrows, at corners of the mouth and on the jaw. When the experimenter touched these electrodes, participants would contract the relevant muscles, thus eliciting certain facial expressions inadvertently. Participants were then required to rate affective responses to slides and it was found that participants felt happier when their facial features resembles smiles and less happy when their facial features represented frowns.

The ability to accurately interpret facial expressions of emotion can be considered crucial to social interaction (Arango de Montis, Brune, Fresón, Ortega Font, Villanueva, Saracco, & Muñoz-Delgado, 2013). Facial expressions are physiological correlates to complex mental states, thus their major function being to swiftly communicate the current internal state, such as happiness and confusion, between individuals (Fasel & Luettin, 2003; Blair, 2003). For example, the behavioural phenotype for the positive mental state happiness is most commonly known to be a smile. However negative mental states such as contempt, anger, jealousy, distress, and fear, are represented by a more diverse range of facial expressions (Arango de Montis et al., 2013). This could be explained through an evolutionary perspective, where negative expressions provided vital information to survival by communicating if there was danger, and of what kind (i.e. an angry expression during confrontation or a peer’s face portraying fear) (Ohman & Mineka, 2001). Subsequently, interpersonal and social conflict may arise from the inability to accurately interpret the information that facial expressions reveal (Leber, Heidenreich, Stangier, & Hofmann, 2009). There are multiple issues that may affect the misinterpretation of facial expressions. In one particular area of this field, evidence has been given in the last several years that suggest a positive influence of non-clinical trait anxiety on the accurate

Empathy is seen in two different types, cognitive and emotional. Each gives a different aspect to how the individual processes information. Cognitive empathy would be the decoding and describing emotional states of others, such as facial expression. Emotional empathy would be the responsiveness to another’s emotional state. Cognitive empathy is the processing of others emotional states and emotional empathy is the response to other’s emotional states. Both of these aspects of empathy are important for this study.

Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen found that when participants were employed in a directed facial action task, their bodies showed differing responses (page 121). For instance, when arranged to have an angry expression, heart rate and finger temperature were very high. This was different then the response to fear because even though it also had a high heart rate, the finger temper was very low (class 9/28/2015). This was also shown in studies done on the blush, by an observed increase in the blood flow to the cheeks and ears (class 9/30/2015). This along with studies on posture, push/ pull, and pen

The ability for an individual to recognize another’s suffering and experience the same emotions to some extent is common in order to promote pro-social behaviour among humans (Cikara, Bruneau, Van Bavel, Saxe, 2014). This ability to empathize with others begins early on and is motivated by the need to alleviate the distress in another when they are suffering. As noted by de Waal (2008), empathy occurs quickly and automatically as a way to respond to the emotional states of others, in turn being a major part of social interactions, coordinated activity, and cooperation toward shared goals. Thus, de Waal (2008) discusses the three different levels of empathy, among which are emotional contagion, sympathetic concern, and empathic perspective-taking. Firstly, emotional contagion is simply about automatic sharing as the individual takes on the emotional state of another even without any understanding of the other (de Waal, 2008). Next, de Waal (2008) suggests sympathetic concern is when an individual attempts to understand and reduce distress in the other (i.e. comforting behaviour), as there is knowledge that the response is about the other. Lastly, empathic perspective-taking occurs when an individual is dependent on imagination and mental state attribution as it is entirely about the other and separate from the self (de Waal, 2008).

Blairy, S., Herrera, P., & Hess, U. (1999). Mimicry and the judgement of emotional facial

Research has proved that it is much harder to understand the emotional state a person then we think. The consequences of misperception may be even more serious if a smile intended to mask another emotional state, for instance anger, is mistaken for an expression of happiness. It follows, therefore, that in order to maximize the functionality conferred by accurate social perception, the perceiver needs to be sensitive to the difference between smiles that are a component of a positive emotional experience, and those that serve other communicative functions (Miles et al., 2007).

Empathy as a differentiating principle is wrong because it is structural: if X looks like me, resembles me, behaves like me – than he must be like me in other, more profound and deep set ways. But this is a faulty method used to prove identity. Any novice in mathematics knows that similarity is never identity. Structurally and behaviourally monkeys, dogs and dolphins are very much like us. It is a question of quantity, not quality, that is used to determine the answers to the

"People all around the world have...the same kind of immediate reactions to the same types of emotional stimuli." (Matsumoto, 2006) We respond to emotional stimuli because of what are known as mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are thought to help us learn socially and to learn from observation. For example, “Whether a person is actively reaching for a cup or observes another reaching for a cup, there is a common neural activation in response to both events...” (Goolkasian, 2009) This includes whether we see a person smiling or we smile. Our brain lights up as if we are looking at a reflection of ourselves. Research has demonstrated that both experiencing an emotion and perceiving it in others has a common neurological basis, and this forms the foundation for empathic abilities. (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2008) This interplay has been termed a double interact because the “give and take between sender and receiver of expressed emotions is composed of a series of double interacts” (Rafaeli & Sutton, 1989) creating a sort of emotional tennis game that can either increase or decrease specific emotional responses in both parties depending on the interaction. This is similar in many respects to what Freud was hinting at when he contributed to the ideas of “transference” and “counter-transference” and what Jung expanded on with the idea of “co-transference”. No matter how you look at it, this is some serious food