Dimberg demonstrated that we don’t decide to be empathic—we simply are. Having pasted small electrodes onto his subjects’ faces so as to register the tiniest muscle movements, he presented them with pictures of angry and happy faces on a computer screen. Humans frown in reaction to angry faces and pull up the corners of their mouths in reaction to happy ones. This by itself was not his most critical finding, however, because such mimicry could be deliberate. The revolutionary part was that he got the same reaction if the pictures flashed on the screen too briefly for conscious perception.
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