I’m curious if there are any other Dopers who have this quirk too.
Would this include people who absentmindedly mimic the mouth expressions of someone who is speaking to them? I’ve encountered people who’ve done this before. It was rather annoying. Is this echopraxia?
I can’t imagine that someone would do this on purpose, so I’d say yes, this would count.
I can’t say I’ve ever noticed anyone doing this before, though.
Really? Maybe you are one of them? 
Hmmm…
No seriously though, they do it in a way that suggests they aren’t even aware they are doing it, their lips are mouthing the same words that you say, just a sec after you’ve said them. I think it may be a form of concentrating, or listening attentively maybe?
I wouldn’t be surprised if I do it. I often don’t know I’m doing it until I catch myself after the fact.
I know it is annoying and weird. The only way I can prevent it from happening is to not look at people who use a lot of hand gestures. But then people don’t like when you avoid looking at them in conversations.
Sounds like echolalia, only nonvocalized or subvocalized, but the Wiki article does say that echolalia and echopraxia are closely related phenomena.
Hmmph… My grandfather (RIP), father, and according to my mom even I, at least sometimes, do that. Especially when we’re looking at the person in the eye/very attentively.
My mom just gets slightly annoyed and points it out when my dad or I do it very obviously to her. I’ve also been careful sometimes not to do it, check myself carefully. It seems it was stronger in my grandfather and dad, but not so much with me. At least, I don’t get called on it much.
We also do the whole “talking with ourselves”, but using full gestures and moving lips silently. Mom also has had to point it out sometimes.
Back in my junior college days I had a professor with a pronounced facial tick. If I spent any time with him I would start doing it too. It was not deliberate.
Closest I got was jerking my feet like crazy when we were watching the kids play soccer. My wife used to make fun of me.
Now they don’t play soccer any more, so I can pass as a normal person in many situations:D
I had an office coworker that did something like that. When I’d be talking, she’d repeat what I said at a low-but-audible level and trailing about a syllable and a half behind me. It was like trying to converse over a phone line with an annoying echo at just the right delay to derail your thought process completely.
As far as I could tell it was somewhere between involuntary and unconscious on her part. She didn’t seem to be doing it as a way to listen extra intently or reinforce artificially or anything like that.
Funny enough, I don’t recall ever seeing or hearing her do that when talking over the phone. It only happened in person. And she did it to everybody, not just me.
She did it less and less over the 5+ years we worked together. It didn’t seem to be connected to familiarity with the speaker either. In the later years she wasn’t doing it to old heads nor to newbies.
Odd. She was otherwise normal and a very personable character.
I’ve seen that in a few clients whose main issues were OCD-related.
Are you a mental health professional?
I didn’t know I was echopraxic until I started therapy several years ago. My therapist gestures a lot when she speaks, and she’s pretty talkative. So every session I’d get a work-out mirroring her movements. I knew I was doing it and I felt embarrassed by it, but I never brought it up because I thought there might be the slimmest chance she didn’t notice what I was doing.
After about three years, I was finally brave enough to bring it up. That was when I first realized how much of a terrific actress (in a good way) she was. Not only had she indeed noticed my behavior, but she told me it used to creep her out a lot. I was embarrassed by this revelation, but also intrigued that she had managed to hide her feelings for so long (I know that’s what they are supposed to do, but still). She asked if I wanted her to point it out to me whenever I did it, and I told her no. I don’t think I’d like knowing the “truth”. I prefer to think that no one can see what I’m doing.
I laughed when you said you kick your feet while watching soccer. Whenever I watch tennis, I am unable to resist copying the players’ moves. Especially when they serve. I can watch other sports with no problem though.
I know a handful of people who not only do this, they speak out loud too. It’s absolutely one of the most annoying things in the fu king universe. I sometimes throw in some no sense so they are obviously wrong and obviously talking over me, then I give them some shit about it.
On occasion if I notice someone with what I perceive as an odd expression I have a compulsion to copy them. However I can suppress it until after they have gone and I don’t think anyone is looking at me. It sort of feels like I want to know what it feels like to make that face. I didn’t know it had a name before.
A lifelong friend of mine does this. He’s African-American and very religious, and I’ve always wondered whether he went to a church where the services were of the call-and-response variety.
While I don’t exhibit echopraxia or echolalia, there are two things I sometimes catch myself doing:
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‘aping’ - matching people’s posture, arrangement of hands/arms/legs during conversation. I sometimes deliberately change my position to avoid doing this; and
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matching people’s inflections and tone in quick exchanges of greeting.
I think both are subconscious and spring from wanting to establish rapport with people.