Reading of ingroup politicians’ smiles triggers smiling in the corner of one’s eyes

Capturing political support from spontaneous smile reactions detected in others’ faces can be used to gauge electorate preference. But will a smile elicited in the corner of one’s eye while reading of a favored politician smiling indicate positive disposition and political support for target candidates? From an embodied simulation perspective, we tested whether reading of an ingroup or outgroup politician smiling would trigger morphologically different smiles in faces of readers. In a reading task in the laboratory, participants were presented with subject-verb phrases describing left and right-wing politicians smiling or frowning while their facial muscular reactions were measured via electromyography (EMG) recording from the zygomaticus major (ZM, lip puller muscle), orbicularis oculi (OO, eye corner muscle) and the corrugator supercili (CS, wrinkler of the eyebrows). We expected and found that participants responded with a smile detected at the lip puller (ZM) and eye corner (OO) facial muscles when exposed to portrayals of smiling politicians of same political orientation, and reported more positive emotions towards these latter. When reading about outgroup politicians smiling, there was a weaker activation of the lip corner (ZM) muscle and no activation of the eye corner (OO) muscle, while emotions reported towards outgroup politicians were significantly more negative. Also, a more enhanced frown response (CS) was found for ingroup compared to outgroup politicians’ frown expressions. Present findings suggest that a politician’s smile may go a long way to influence electorates through both non-verbal and verbal pathways. They add another layer to our understanding of how language and social information shape embodied effects in a highly nuanced manner.