People often spontaneously engage in copying each other's postures and mannerisms, a phenomenon referred to as behavioral mimicry. Social psychology experiments indicate that mimicry denotes an implicit affiliative signal flexibly regulated in response to social requirements. Yet, the mediating processes and neural underpinnings of such regulation are largely unexplored. The present functional ...

Molecular mimicry is the process by which T cells activated in response to determinants on an infecting microorganism cross-react with self epitopes, leading to an autoimmune disease. Normally, infection of SJL/J mice with the BeAn strain of Theiler's murine encephalomyelitis virus (TMEV) results in a persistent CNS infection, leading to a chronic progressive, CD4(+) T cell-mediated demyelinati...

Celiac disease is associated with multiple extraintestinal presentations, including bone disease, endocrine disorders and neurological deficits. We report a 9 year old girl with celiac disease presenting with recurrent Guillain Barre syndrome (third episode). There was no other clinical manifestation except for refractory iron deficiency anemia. Molecular mimicry explaining the association betw...

A 13-year-old girl developed bilateral chronic anterior uveitis following bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccination. HLA testing was negative for B27 but positive for DRB1 *0404, a variant of DR4 often associated with rheumatoid arthritis. The authors propose her HLA repertoire allowed for a BCG-induced abnormal autoimmune response by the mechanism of molecular mimicry.

Mimicry has been ascribed affiliative functions. In three experiments, we used a newly developed social-affective mimicry task (SAMT) to investigate mimicry ́s modulation by emotional facial expressions (happy, angry) and ethnic group-membership (White in-group, Black out-group). Experiment 1 established the main consistent effect across experiments, which was enhanced mimicry to angry out-group...