Mirror neurons, postural echo and mirroring

Reciprocal relationships are the basis of our being in the world and they are to such an extent that our organism, over time and with evolution, has developed and encoded some programs at a physiological level, able to activate and execute themselves autonomously, not guided by our will.

Every communicative and interactional moment, therefore, is guided by conscious and unconscious behaviors, the combination of which influences the course and outcome of the communicative act, which in my opinion is a sort of holism, where the result of the act itself transcends the sum of its individual components: verbal, paraverbal, and nonverbal.

One of the most important elements, which can be conscious or not, is that of mimicry, that is, following our interlocutor in the ways in which they communicate and interact, being able to decide, as far as the conscious or controllable part is concerned (I will return to this point later), when and how to do it, including of course the possibility of not doing it at all.

There is, first of all, what I like to call “physiological mimicry”, involuntary and therefore difficult to control, which exists by virtue of mirror neurons (1) – although their existence in humans is now universally recognized, what is still debated is what they are actually responsible for (2) – and which, free from any conditioning, we could define as inescapable, for better or for worse.

This involuntary mimicry – we laugh when our interlocutor laughs and yawn with them – creates a sort of harmony between interlocutors, which in a certain sense is neutral, precisely by virtue of its involuntariness, its automatic nature: we simply mimic, or tend to mimic, what the other does, especially when what they do has a clear and perceivable intentional content (or, in other words, when we perceive the intent of our interlocutor's actions and create, in our brain, a mirror representation of both the intent and the actions necessary to fulfill it) (5), in a way that might even seem decontextualized with respect to the object of the interaction, of the communication, but which obviously is not, since everything ultimately responds to the emotional states experienced during such interaction.

It is therefore an involuntary mimicry, which, despite its limitations, supports and reinforces what is being said – but which can obviously also diminish and contradict it – of which it would be good to become aware, at least in part, since a mimicry tout court does not always lead to what we would like the interaction to lead to.

Specifically regarding the non-verbal component, the mimicry induced by mirror neurons can be ascribed to what is more broadly referred to as "postural echo" (3), that is, following our interlocutor in their gestures, evaluating when it is appropriate or not in relation to the objectives we have set for ourselves and those that, likewise, they will have set for themselves.

If a postural echo that mirrors a positive gesture helps to strengthen the harmony between interlocutors, reinforcing what is being said and creating overall coherence, the problem arises of what to do when our interlocutor adopts gestures or a posture (I remind you that here we are talking about the nonverbal component and that by posture we mean both gestures and facial expressions) generally associated with a willingness to close off, in a very general sense, and which therefore poses a potential obstacle to the continuation of communication or, at the very least, to its effectiveness.

Such a situation, moreover, quickly brings us to the more general theme of mirroring, well known in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (4), which extends what postural echo teaches us and leads us to the topic of approaching the other, of tuning in with them and with the experience they are living, in short, the attempt to empathize with them.

Mirroring, moreover, mainly investigates situations of initial disagreement, distance, and estrangement; those situations, in other words, where some kind of recovery is necessary, whether this is aimed, for example, at confirming an emotional relationship or at successfully closing a business negotiation.

Mirroring, which also includes postural echoing—since this is a kind of gestural mirroring—does not offer a unique and universally accepted solution in the case of a negative, closed situation, where the natural countermeasure should be to force such an attitude, using what NLP teaches us as a lever to bring it back to one of effective collaboration.

It is precisely on the forcing that there is no unanimity of views, as this can be achieved:

through the verbal component, simply trying to review, integrate or correct what has just been said;
through an immediate action aimed at dismantling the closed posture (a typical example is, in the case of crossed arms, to get help from our interlocutor, for example, to open a bottle of water, so that he is forced to uncross them);
by mirroring, therefore copying what he is doing, getting closer to him, and then guiding him towards a posture of non-closure or, even better, of total openness, which through its feedback brings similar openness in his emotional state (6).

To give a clarifying example (at least I hope so), think of two hikers, one of whom has a significantly faster pace than the other, who find themselves in a situation where the different pace could potentially create a risk, for example not reaching the destination before nightfall. In such a scenario, the three approaches just described would lead to:

encouraging the slower companion, varying between trying to convince him to speed up ("come on, if we don't speed up, we'll get lost in the night"), up to almost threatening him if that doesn't happen ("if you don't get a move on, I'll come over there and make you walk faster by kicking you!");
showing him something that attracts him, for example a water bottle or a cigarette, so that he is encouraged to speed up to reach us;
slowing ourselves down, walking alongside him and diverting the discussion from the risks associated with being slow, instead talking about how beautiful the place we're heading to is, and then, gradually, moving from mirroring to leading, gradually speeding up, to a pace that is sustainable for him and a compromise with what we would be able to do.

If it is evident – at least I hope so – that point 3 is the one that fully embraces the technique of mirroring, whose effectiveness is well known (especially compared to the other two points), what I consider less evident is its universal applicability, since, as I have tried to discuss in this previous article, human interaction and communication are so multifaceted and complex that they always require an approach that takes into account the who and the here and now, aspects that essentially escape any attempt at a priori codification, which at most can be useful as a cue, as a good practice in cases of total ignorance of the other, but instead must always be specialized when this is not the case.

Andrea Zinno - De Corporis Voce

Bibliographic references

State of Mind - Mirror neurons: history of the discovery and theories compared – 2017
Neuroscientifically Challenged - Know your brain: Mirror neurons - 2017
Allan Pease and Barbara Pease - “The Definitive Book of Body Language” – 2006
Jerry Richardson – Introduction to NLP - 2002
Dan Siegel - Explains Mirror Neurons in Depth (Video) – 2011
Wikipedia - Facial feedback hypothesis