Abstract
Understanding other people’s emotions is one of the most important things people do in daily life. Multiple systems are involved in this process including sensorimotor simulation, the inhibition of activity in sensorimotor networks (Wood, Rychlowska, & Niedenthal, 2016). Sensorimotor simulation has been studied in simple tasks such as reading a narrative or looking at pictures, but it is unclear how this simulation-related brain activity might play out in daily interactions that are far more complex than the experience of research participants in traditional social neuroscience studies that use non-naturalistic stimuli, nor do we know its impact on empathic accuracy. Therefore, we explored people’s ability to understand another’s emotions by combining a face-to-face interaction with a reliable index of sensorimotor simulation, which is mu suppression, an 8–13 Hz band-range of the electroencephalogram (EEG) over the motor cortex (Ulloa, & Pineda, 2007) in this study. In the experiment, we recorded EEG as participants took turns sharing one positive and one negative experience with their partner while the other listened passively. They later watched video recordings of the shared experience and rated the emotion expressed by themselves and their partner. Correlations between self– and partner–ratings served as an estimate of empathic accuracy, the extent to which they understand each other’s emotions. Following the experience sharing task, participants watched their partner repeatedly squeezing a ball, and EEG mu suppression during the observation of the partner’s ball squeezing served as a measure of sensorimotor simulation. We hypothesized that stronger mu suppression would be correlated with higher empathic accuracy and that this association would be moderated by emotional expression displayed in conversations, such that having more emotional expression would be associated with a stronger correlation between mu suppression and empathic accuracy. We did not find a correlation between mu suppression and empathic accuracy, but we found evidence supporting a positive correlation between emotional expressions and empathic accuracy.