Article Associations between Cognitive Concepts of Self and Emotional Facial Expressions with an Emphasis on Emotion Awareness Peter Walla 1,2,3, * and Aimee Mavratzakis 3   Citation: Walla, P.; Mavratzakis, A. Associations between Cognitive Concepts of Self and Emotional Facial Expressions with an Emphasis on Emotion Awareness. Psych 2021, 3, 48–60. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/psych3020006 Academic Editors: Natasha Loi and Mosad Zineldin Received: 5 March 2021 Accepted: 19 April 2021 Published: 27 April 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). 1 Faculty of Psychology, SigmundFreud University, Vienna 1020, Austria 2 Faculty of Medicine, Sigmund Freud University, Vienna 1020, Austria 3 School of Psychology, Centre for Translational Neuroscience and Mental Health Research, University of Newcastle, Callaghan 2308, Australia; aimee.mavratzakis@newcastle.edu.au * Correspondence: peter.walla@sfu.ac.at Abstract: Recognising our own and others’ emotions is vital for healthy social development. The aim of the current study was to determine how emotions related to the self or to another influence behavioural expressions of emotion. Facial electromyography (EMG) was used to record spontaneous facial muscle activity in nineteen participants while they passively viewed negative, positive and neutral emotional pictures during three blocks of referential instructions. Each participant imagined themself, another person or no one experiencing the emotional scenario, with the priming words “You”, “Him” or “None” presented before each picture for the respective block of instructions. Emotion awareness (EA) was also recorded using the TAS-20 alexithymia questionnaire. Corrugator supercilii (cs) muscle activity increased significantly between 500 and 1000 ms post stimulus onset during negative and neutral picture presentations, regardless of ownership. Independent of emotion, cs activity was greatest during the “no one” task and lowest during the “self” task from less than 250 to 1000 ms. Interestingly, the degree of cs activation during referential tasks was further modulated by EA. Low EA corresponded to significantly stronger cs activity overall compared with high EA, and this effect was even more pronounced during the “no one” task. The findings suggest that cognitive processes related to the perception of emotion ownership can influence spontaneous facial muscle activity, but that a greater degree of integration between higher cognitive and lower affective levels of information may interrupt or suppress these behavioural expressions of emotion. Keywords: emotion; spontaneous facial mimicry; self; emotion awareness; electromyography 1. Introduction The ability to recognise and attend to other people’s emotions is essential for healthy social integration and general well-being. Deficits in this ability are observed in virtu- ally all forms of psychopathology including autism and schizophrenia, to name only a few [1]. Recognising other people’s emotions also requires the more fundamental ability to discriminate the self from others in order to identify and contrast one’s own emotional ex- periences from another’s experiences. Interestingly, deficits in self and other discriminatory processing are also highly symptomatic of social-emotional disorders [1]. In line with these observations, research has shown that brain activity associated with self and other discrimination is modulated by emotional context, suggesting that the two forms of information processing in the brain are intertwined [2–7]. However, little research has been carried out to determine how self and other discriminatory neural processes relate to emotion recognition. Research on the embodiment of emotion follows the idea that the recognition of emo- tion in another person occurs via the simulation of that person’s observed emotional cues, leading to the representation of that person’s emotional state in the observer through phys- ical experience [8,9]. Facial mimicry is a robust aspect of emotion embodiment involving the simulation of an observed emotion through congruent facial expressions. Studies have Psych 2021, 3, 48–60. https://doi.org/10.3390/psych3020006 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/psych