Abstract
Both perceptions of warmth and competence predicted an increase in helping intentions. [...]participants showed the least motor resonance with high competence-medium warmth targets, suggesting the importance of both social dimensions in driving neural simulation of targets' actions. [...]the objective of the current study was to manipulate warmth and competence perceptions of individual targets directly to investigate the effects on 1) action-related neural processing and 2) intentions toward those specific individuals. [...]preliminary findings from our laboratory show that, although threatening actions elicited significantly stronger motor resonance than neutral actions, positive action did not elicit increased motor resonance (Gutsell & Inzlicht, 2013). [...]others have found that disrupting motor resonance leads to longer reaction times in an emotion recognition task for fearful and angry facial expressions, whereas happy expressions remained unaffected (Balconi & Bortolotti, 2013). [...]we predicted either a quadratic trend for warmth with both high and low warmth targets eliciting increased motor resonance compared to medium warmth targets or a linear trend with only low warmth targets eliciting motor resonance.