Emotional mimicry in social context

"Sociality is central to being human and it depends on our ability to understand others, but not just in the way that we might understand something physical, like how to pick an apple from a tree. In this chapter I draw together some threads of other chapters in the book, and develop the idea that human sociality is based on emotions and that it involves sharing pieces of mind. Empathy offers a clear example of emotion-based sharing of mind. As explained in this book's Chapter 9 by Walter and colleagues, it enables us to experience in our selves something of an emotion of another person. Singer et al. (2004) studied the phenomenon by monitoring the brains of respondents when they were themselves experiencing pain and when they were signalled that a loved one in another room was experiencing the same kind of pain. The anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex were activated in both cases. A piece of brain activation and a piece of mind were shared. De Vignemont and Singer's (2006) explain that empathy, of this kind, occurs when someone has an emotion that is similar to that of another person, when one sees or imagines the other person having that emotion, and when one knows that the other is the source of one's own emotion"--