Emotional Response Valence Facilitates Automatic Imitation of Visual Speech

This experiment provides evidence that the emotional valence of our own speech production affects the extent to which we are able to disregard conflicting distracting visual speech information. The emotional valence of the distracting information itself does not affect the extent to which we can ignore this information. Our results imply that our own emotional mood affects how much we automatically imitate our conversation partner, but that the emotional status of our interlocutor is less important. The results support theoretical accounts suggesting that imitation in everyday life is governed by general cognitive mechanisms. However, these accounts are to be extended to include predictions regarding the emotional valence of both interaction partners.