frontiersin | A smile is a context-dependent emotional expression. A smiling face can
signal the experience of enjoyable emotions, but people can also smile
to convince another person that enjoyment is occurring when it is not.
For this reason, the ability to discriminate between felt and faked
enjoyment expressions is a crucial social skill. Despite its importance,
adults show remarkable individual variation in this ability. Revealing
the factors responsible for these huge individual differences is a key
challenge in this domain. Here we investigated, on a large sample of
participants, whether individual differences in smile authenticity
recognition are accounted for by differences in the predisposition to
experience other people's emotions, i.e., by susceptibility to emotional
contagion. Results showed that susceptibility to emotional contagion
for negative emotions increased smile authenticity detection, while
susceptibility to emotional contagion for positive emotions worsened
detection performance, because it leaded to categorize most of the faked
smiles as sincere. These findings suggest that susceptibility to
emotional contagion plays a key role in complex emotion recognition, and
point out the importance of analyzing the tendency to experience other
people's positive and negative emotions as separate abilities.
