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Chapter 384research has demonstrated that tears increase the perceived sadness in others and, thereby also the wish to help them (K%u00fcster, 2018). Perceiving tears thus seems to elicit approach behaviour and, induces sympathetic arousal. Despite the scarce research on physiological responses to the observation of crying individuals, our findings substantiate the suggested function of tears as an effective call for social support (Balsters et al., 2013; Gra%u010danin et al., 2018) by highlighting their strong resonance in the observer.The above-described results include all robust findings of our study. Apart from these results, various other, non-robust emotion-specific effects on the physiological measures require further examination. At this moment, these effects should be considered specific to our sample and not be generalized. Most remarkably, these physiological effects show a great divergence across the different expression modalities and emotion categories in our stimulus materials. The most prominent example of this is the emotion of anger which, compared to the respective neutral expressions, was responded to with an increase in SCL if shown in the face and a decrease in SCL if expressed by the body. In contrast, the exact opposite pattern became apparent in the SKT responses to angry faces (SKT decrease) and angry bodies (SKT increase). This lack of coherence between physiological channels is in line with our first key finding and complements evidence against an %u2018all-ornone%u2019 activation of the sympathetic nervous system and for a more differentiated view of ANS targets (Ax, 1953; Kreibig, 2010). Moreover, while bodily expressions of emotion were described to be automatically integrated in the processing of facial emotional expressions and facilitate their recognition (de Gelder, 2006; Kret, Stekelenburg, et al., 2013; Poyo Solanas et al., 2018), isolated expressions from the two modalities might not automatically resonate similarly in an observer%u2019s body.From a functional standpoint, the limited extent of a consistent autonomic tuning to prototypical emotional expressions does make sense: Instead of requiring affect sharing for informative or affiliative purposes, our passive viewing task provided subjects with a stream of static and posed displays of emotion without a relevant social context (Fridlund, 1991; Hess & Fischer, 2013). The use of static images posed a limitation concerning ecological validity as compared to real dynamic expressions (Krumhuber et al., 2013). Further, our participants were automatically put in the role of a passive observer, knowing that a displayed individual was not receiving any information about their own expressions. Importantly, the opportunity to