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When interacting with someone, we tend to mimic their emotional expressions. This phenomenon is called emotional mimicry and is defined as the imitation of the counterpart’s emotional display (Hess & Fischer, 2013, 2014). Emotional mimicry is socially beneficial through increased liking, empathy, and social interaction quality (Hess & Fischer, 2022; Mauersberger & Hess, 2019). However, emotional mimicry is moderated by social factors such as group membership, similarity, or liking which can further impact social interaction (Bourgeois & Hess, 2008; Hess et al., 2022; McIntosh, 2006). To our knowledge, no study tested the influence of stigmatization of mental health diagnoses on emotional mimicry. According to Link and Phelan (2001), stigma is the convergence of four components: (1) labeling human differences, (2) associating the label with negative stereotypes, (3) separating the ones labeled from others, and (4) status loss and discrimination against the ones labeled. Studies demonstrated that individuals with mental health diagnoses are strongly stigmatized leading to increase public fear and desire for limited social interaction (Angermeyer & Matschinger, 2003; Link et al., 1999). This decreased willingness for social interaction could impact healthy subjects’ tendency to mimic stigmatized individuals’ emotional expressions as emotional mimicry is dependent on a desire for affiliation (Hess & Fischer, 2022). In this study, we aim to test whether putting a stigmatizing label on someone in the domain of mental health diagnoses influences emotional mimicry toward this person. We are also interested in measuring liking and interpersonal closeness as studies demonstrated that these variables mediate the influence of social factors on emotional mimicry (Kastendieck et al., 2020; Peng et al., 2021). We decided to focus our study on schizophrenia (SCZ) because it is one of the most stigmatized mental health diagnoses (Wood et al., 2014). Additionally, social interaction deficits represent a core diagnostic feature of schizophrenia as outlined in the DSM-IV. Hence, diminished emotional mimicry toward people with schizophrenia could worsen the social exclusion of patients. Our work aims to highlight a potential line of work to conduct on healthy subjects, rather than on patients, to alleviate the social exclusion of people with schizophrenia. Consequently, we will also conduct exploratory analyses to investigate if overall knowledge of schizophrenia, and explicit stigma of schizophrenia moderate the relationship between the stigma labeling and emotional mimicry. We will use an online procedure composed of the four experimental conditions corresponding to four labels (schizophrenia, diabetes, healthy, and a negative adjective). Each condition is needed to discern whether participants' response to the SCZ label is influenced by stigma, a specific diagnosis, or a negative label. The negative adjectives were chosen as they were rated similarly as determined by K-means cluster analysis to the schizophrenia label on a 10-point valence scale by 30 participants in a pretest [mean SCZ=3.03 (SD=1.79); mean lazy=2.80 (SD=1.65); mean hot tempered=3.17(SD=1.70); mean intolerant=2.9(SD=1.56)]. The labels will describe actors displaying happiness or sadness in short video clips. The stimuli were taken from The Amsterdam dynamic facial expression set (ADFES, van der Schalk et al., 2011). We will measure four dependent variables: emotional mimicry of sadness, emotional mimicry of happiness, perceived interpersonal closeness, and liking. For emotional mimicry, participants’ faces will be recorded with their computer’s webcam while watching the emotional stimuli. The videos of participants’ faces will then be analyzed with OpenFace 2.2 (Baltrusaitis et al., 2018) to obtain facial action unit activation and compute a happiness and sadness mimicry score after a baseline correction and within-subjects z-standardization (Hess et al., 1991; Hess et al., 2017; Kastendieck et al., 2021). For perceived interpersonal closeness, we will use an adapted slider scale version of the Inclusion of Other in the Self scale (IOS, Aron et al., 1992). For liking, we will ask participants to rate how much they liked the person on the video on a 100-slider scale. To ensure that participants stay focused on the video and do not guess our hypotheses, we use a cover story that deals with antidepressants. Hence, participants will also have to answer whether they believe the person on the video is taking antidepressants or not and whether this person should start or stop treatment with antidepressants. In addition, studies demonstrated that emotional recognition tasks enhance emotional mimicry (Murata et al., 2016). Results of the emotional recognition task also allow us to verify that participants perceived the stimuli correctly. Consequently, after every stimulus presentation, the two dependent variables from the rating domain (IOS and liking), the emotion recognition task, and the cover story questions will be asked. Finally, at the end of the experiment, participants will answer the Knowledge About Schizophrenia Test (KAST, Compton et al., 2007) to measure their overall knowledge of schizophrenia and the Social Distance Scale (Link et al., 1987) to explicitly test their level of stigmatization toward individuals with schizophrenia.

International audience; Although existing studies indicate a positive effect of interpersonal motor coordination (IMC) on likability, no consensus has been reached as for the effect of likability back onto IMC. The present study specifically investigated the causal effect of likability on IMC and explored, by tracking the natural gaze direction, the possible underlying mechanisms. Twenty-two participants were engaged in an interpersonal finger-tapping task with a confederate in three likability conditions (baseline, likable, and unlikable), while wearing an eye tracker. They had to perform finger tapping at their comfort tempo with the confederate who tapped at the same or 1.5 times of the participant's preferred frequency. Results showed that when tapping at the same frequency, the effect of likability on IMC varied with time. Participants coordinated at a higher level in the baseline condition at the beginning of the coordination task, and a facilitative effect of likability on IMC was revealed in the last session. As a novelty, our results evidenced a positive correlation between IMC and the amount of gaze onto the coordination partner's movement only in the likable condition. No effect of likability was found when the confederate was tapping at 1.5 times of the participant's preferred frequency. Our research suggests that the psychosocial property of the coordinating partner should be taken into consideration when investigating the performance of IMC and that IMC is a parameter that is sensitive to multiple factors.

International audience; Joint-improvisation is not only an open-ended creative action that two or more people perform together in the context of an artistic performance (e.g., theatre, music or dance). Joint-improvisation also takes place in daily life activities when humans take part in collective performance such as toddlers at play or adults engaged in a conversation. In the context of this article, joint-improvisation has been looked at from a social motor coordination perspective. In the literature, the nature of the social motor coordination characteristics of joint-improvisation for either the creative aspect or daily life features of this motor performance remains unclear. Additionally, both solo-improvisation and joint-improvisation need to be studied conjointly to establish the influence of the social element of improvisation in the emergence of multi-agent motor coordination. In order to better understand those two types of improvisation, we compared three level of expertise - novice, intermediate and professional in dance improvisation to identify movement characteristics for each of the groups. Pairs of the same level were asked to improvise together. Each individual was also asked to perform an improvisation on his/her own. We found that each of the three groups present specific movement organization with movement complexity increasing with the level of expertise. Experts performed shorter movement duration in conjunction with an increase range of movement. The direct comparison of individual and paired Conditions highlighted that the joint-improvisation reduced the complexity of the movement organization and those for all three levels while maintaining the differences between the groups. This direct comparison amongst those three distinct groups provides an original insight onto the nature of movement patterns in joint-improvisation situation. Overall, it reveals the role of both individual and collective properties in the emergence of social coordination.

Resume Il est actuellement admis que les symptomes negatifs apparaissent precocement dans la maladie schizophrenique et seraient plus predictifs du fonctionnement futur des patients que les symptomes positifs [16] . L’apathie, symptome transnosographique puisqu’on le retrouve dans un ensemble de maladies neurologiques [14] , fait partie des symptomes negatifs frequemment rencontres dans la schizophrenie et s’avere constituer un handicap majeur pour le retablissement des individus qui en souffrent [19] . Cependant, si les traitements medicamenteux (neuroleptiques de premiere et seconde generations) ont fait la preuve de leur efficacite sur les symptomes positifs, ils n’ont montre que peu d’effets sur les symptomes negatifs et particulierement dans l’apathie pouvant meme parfois, du fait de leurs effets secondaires l’aggraver [40] . Longtemps consideree en clinique comme la perte de la volonte, des avancees recentes issues de la neuropsychologie cognitive et des donnees en neuro-imagerie ont abouti a des definitions plus strictes et des approches necessairement multidimensionnelle de l’apathie. L’apathie peut actuellement se definir comme une reduction quantitative et donc observable de comportements volontaires orientes vers un ou plusieurs buts [13] . Neanmoins a notre connaissance, ces differents modeles n’ont jamais ete mis a l’epreuve dans la maladie schizophrenique. Cet article a pour objectif de passer en revue les avancees scientifiques recentes portant sur l’apathie. Puis dans un second temps, d’explorer si les approches multidimensionnelles actuelles peuvent s’appliquer a la complexite psychopathologique decrite sous le terme d’apathie dans cette pathologie schizophrenique.

Introduction Social interactions dysfunctions make up core symptoms of many mental disorders and have been extensively studied through cognitive paradigms gathered under the concept of social cognition. Nevertheless, a growing body of literature have demonstrated that motor coordination is an important feature of these human social interactions but has been little studied in the context of mental diseases. Objective In this study, we propose to compare the processes of inter-agent coordination in healthy and socially impaired clinical populations (e.g. schizophrenia and social phobia patients). Method 20 schizophrenia and 20 social phobia patients were compared to 20 healthy subjects using an hand-held pendulum paradigm in intentional and unintentional interpersonal motor coordination, with different leadership conditions. All participants had psychopathological and neuropsychological evaluations. Results Our results demonstrated that each group of subject was characterised by specific signature concerning interpersonal motor coordination. More specifically, instability of the coordination and temporal delay between patient and controls revealed that schizophrenia impaired intentional coordination but not spontaneous non-intentional coordination whereas social phobia only affected leader conditions. Conclusion Taken altogether, these preliminary results give evidence that motor control through motor coordination behaviours is a fundamental part of social interactions deficits in schizophrenia and social phobia. These results lead us to examine if the evaluation of motor coordination during a social interactions could help to discriminate the deficits in social interactions and to propose specific therapy for their rehabilitation. Acknowledgements This research was supported by an Agence Nationale de la Recherche grant (Project SCAD # ANR-09- BLAN-0405-03).

We present novel, low-cost and non-invasive potential diagnostic biomarkers of schizophrenia. They are based on the ‘mirror-game’, a coordination task in which two partners are asked to mimic each other’s hand movements. In particular, we use the patient’s solo movement, recorded in the absence of a partner, and motion recorded during interaction with an artificial agent, a computer avatar or a humanoid robot. In order to discriminate between the patients and controls, we employ statistical learning techniques, which we apply to nonverbal synchrony and neuromotor features derived from the participants’ movement data. The proposed classifier has 93% accuracy and 100% specificity. Our results provide evidence that statistical learning techniques, nonverbal movement coordination and neuromotor characteristics could form the foundation of decision support tools aiding clinicians in cases of diagnostic uncertainty., Mirror game test could detect schizophrenia A new test of movement and social interaction could detect markers of schizophrenia, and help to diagnose and manage the condition. In an effort to establish reliable indicators of schizophrenia, Piotr Slowinski at the University of Exeter, UK and colleagues developed a test that could detect deficits in movement and social interactions, both characteristics of the disorder. They asked people to perform movements alone, and to mirror the movements of a computer avatar or a humanoid robot. Automated analysis of the movements allowed to distinguish people with schizophrenia from healthy participants with accuracy and specificity slightly better than clinical interviews and comparable to test based on much more expensive neuroimaging methods. The technique could help with diagnosis of schizophrenia and to monitor patients’ responses to treatment, but needs to be tested in clinical trials before being applied in clincal practice.