Slideshow: Funeral and reaction to the death of Kim Jong Il

KCNA / EPA

News of the North Korean leader's death sparks tears from his followers and concerns around the world as power is handed over to his successor.

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The images of North Koreans frantically weeping and wailing during Wednesday's funeral procession for Kim Jong Il may seem forced and fabricated to Americans who viewed the former leader as a dangerous despot.

But experts say that the scenes we’re seeing on TV aren’t necesarily out of the ordinary or over the top for North Koreans in grief. And they may even be the honest expressions of a nation not knowing how to go on once their cult-like leader dies.

“This is a society that is organized around a mass cult-like devotion to the leader,” said Mike Chinoy, a senior fellow at the U.S. China Institute at the University of Southern California and author of “Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis.” “When you have the death of a figure that you spent your whole life worshipping you’re going to feel fear and uncertainty and anxiety about what will happen next.”

You can get a window on the people’s mind-set by listening to the words of the song that was often heard in the streets of North Korea and always played when Kim Jong-Il appeared in public, said Chinoy.

“It was called the ‘Song of General Kim Jong Il,” Chinoy said. “It’s a really catchy tune and you would hear it like 10 times a day. When he appeared in public, they would always play the lines: ‘Without you there is no country. Without you there is no us.’

“If that’s what you’ve been taught – or brainwashed – to believe your whole life and suddenly you are without that leader, you’re going to think, ‘What are we going to do now?’”

But it’s also possible some may be feigning distress since it’s expected – and they may fear retribution if they don’t, some say.

When Kim Il Sung, the father of Kim Jong Il, died in 1994, some were punished for not seeming grief stricken enough, defectors from North Korea told Barbara Demick of the Los Angeles Times.

Still, many mourning Kim Jong Il are likely showing the standard signs of grief in Korea, Chinoy said.

“If you’ve ever been to a traditional Korean funeral in South Korea, you’d have seen tremendous weeping and wailing,” Chinoy said. “They are an emotional people who wear their emotions on their sleeves.”

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The strong resemblance of Kim Jong Un (right) to his popular grandfather Kim Il Sung (left) may be subliminally creating warm feelings among his followers.

Photographs show he has his grandfather’s double chin and dark eyebrows, and his haircut supposedly is a throwback to the older man’s style in the 1940s. Some reports speculate that Kim Jong Un has even undergone plastic surgery to make him look more like his popular grandfather, North Korea founder Kim Il Sung, and less like his father, Kim Jong Il, who was not as well-liked.

Whether the resemblance to his grandfather has been inherited and/or surgically enhanced, it sure can’t hurt Kim Jong-Un, his late father’s handpicked successor to lead North Korea, psychologist Robert Bornstein says.  He'll likely benefit from the experience many of us have had of feeling warmly toward a person we’ve just met  simply because they resemble someone we like.

“We tend to prefer things that seem familiar over the things that seem unfamiliar, all other things being equal,” says Bornstein, a psychology professor at Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y. “People will prefer a familiar-looking face over one that is less familiar.”

Psychologists call this phenomenon “the mere-exposure effect,” as in the mere exposure to someone or something leads to liking him or it. “It’s actually very powerful,” says Bornstein, who’s been studying the mere-exposure effect ever since he wrote his dissertation on it in the 1980s.

There are 300 to 400 studies in the scientific literature about the phenomenon, mostly having to do with visual and auditory--“things like voices, accents, the cadence of a person’s voice”--characteristics. “If it rings a bell, then we do have this initial reflexive response to it,” Bornstein says.

In other words, when it comes to North Korea dictators, like grandfather, like grandson.

But can familiarity breed contempt as well as warm fuzzies? Maybe, Bornstein says, although there haven’t been nearly as many studies of that question. But some research suggests that if you meet someone who reminds you of, say, a hated boss, “you have sort of a negative gut reaction to them,” Bornstein says, “and it can be hard to overcome, partly because gut reactions are so powerful.”

Have you had a rush of affection for a stranger just because they look like someone you care about? Tell us on Facebook.