Page 118 - Demo

Chapter 4116actual interactions with the expresser could be expected (Staugaard, 2010). In this study, the presentation time was 2s and the participants were not engaged in any interaction. Effects related to biases in early visual attention (< 500ms) or to the fear of being negatively judged by an interaction partner were, therefore, highly unlikely. Importantly, social anxiety traits had the expected impact on the confidence judgment with regard to emotion recognition in our study. For all expression categories, confidence was reduced with higher social anxiety traits. The underconfidence in performance did, however, not affect the general positive link between confidence in emotion recognition and actual performance. Thus, while participants seemed to be able to calibrate their confidence ratings according to their recognition performance, a relative reduction in the confidence scores might have occurred with higher social anxiety traits. This observation might be a reflection of self-related negative beliefs about one%u2019s own social skills in high socially anxious people, which were likely formed in a public setting (M%u00fcllerPinzler et al., 2019) and translated to a more global negative social skill assessment. Theoretical models on SAD highlight low confidence in own social performance as a relevant cognitive bias in the development and maintenance of the disorder (Clark & Wells, 1995; Heimberg et al., 2010; Rapee & Heimberg, 1997). Evidence for this bias has been found in various studies contrasting social performance and subjective evaluations in real-life scenarios (Dijk et al., 2009; Kashdan & Savostyanova, 2011; Voncken & B%u00f6gels, 2008). The retrospective evaluation of one%u2019s performance in a social situation, so-called post-event processing, has been especially suggested to contribute to negative beliefs about one%u2019s social skills (Gkika et al., 2018). In both highly socially anxious individuals (Dannahy & Stopa, 2007) and individuals with a SAD diagnosis (Helbig-Lang et al., 2016), negativelybiased post-event processing has been shown to be more frequent, and positively related to social anxiety (symptoms). The lower confidence in emotion recognition associated with higher social anxiety traits in our study might also arise from doubts in one%u2019s own ability to recognize another person%u2019s emotional state correctly.Facial muscle responses to emotional expressions were not found to be altered depending on social anxiety traits in our sample. This suggests that not only explicit emotion labelling but also implicit, automatic processes, namely facial mimicry, seem to be comparable across varying levels of social anxiety traits. In our study, there was also little evidence to assume that the link between facial muscle