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Facial Mimicry and Metacognition in Facial Emotion Recognition1174activity and emotion recognition accuracy would be modulated by social anxiety traits. The weakened positive association between zygomaticus responses and the accurate labelling of happy expressions with higher social anxiety trait levels in our study was most likely due to stronger variability in accuracies (i.e., also inaccurate responses despite close to ceiling performance overall) when zygomaticus activity was low. Additionally, the effect could not be reproduced in the analyses with relative accuracy as an outcome (see Supplemental Material). Taken our findings related to social anxiety traits together, heightened social anxiety trait levels were not associated with poorer emotion recognition performance or alterations in the link between facial mimicry and emotion recognition. Yet, confidence in emotion recognition was lower with higher social anxiety trait levels, which indicates that negative beliefs about one%u2019s skills might also exist in the domain of emotion recognition. In order to overcome this and other cognitive biases, Metacognitive Training can be a useful tool in the treatment of SAD (Nordahl & Wells, 2018).In line with previous studies describing worse performance in emotion recognition tasks associated with ASD, we observed overall reduced accuracies with higher autistic traits, which became most apparent for fearful expressions (Frank et al., 2018; Sucksmith et al., 2013; Uljarevic & Hamilton, 2013). The recognition of sad expressions, on the other hand, was not as strongly affected by autistic traits in the main analysis, and even improved with higher autistic trait levels in the relative accuracy analysis (see Supplemental Material). This observation is compatible with a previous study, which reported a better recognition of sad facial expressions with higher autistic trait levels (C. Green & Guo, 2018). Confidence in recognizing displays of sadness as well as fear was rated higher with higher autistic traits. Neutral and happy facial expressions, in contrast, received lower confidence ratings with higher autistic trait levels. Given the negative impact of autistic trait levels on the recognition of fear displays, higher confidence ratings seem particularly surprising. The examination of the relationship between confidence and accuracy in emotion recognition (i.e., metacognitive sensitivity) revealed, however, that participants with higher autistic trait levels in our study were less able to scale their confidence according to their actual performance. Previous research on alterations in metacognitive judgments in ASD has already described a complex pattern of both over- and underconfidence in the social-cognitive domain (DeBrabander et al., 2020).