Page 122 - Demo

Chapter 4120of sadness. In some instances, sensorimotor simulation (i.e., activating facial muscle patterns that are congruent to observed emotional facial expressions) might indeed become a relevant mechanism in understanding others%u2019 emotions. Similar to previous literature, the effects were not robust in our study (see relative accuracy analysis in Supplemental Material), varied depending on clinical trait levels (see paragraphs above), and we did not observe significant relationships for all expression categories (e.g., not for anger). Our study therefore corroborates evidence that an embodiment of observed emotional expressions does not seem necessary for a successful recognition (Folz et al., 2022). Yet, facial feedback can become informative under certain conditions (Coles et al., 2019), and our results highlight that individual differences should additionally be considered.Despite our efforts to create a more naturalistic emotion recognition scenario by displaying spontaneous, dynamic facial expressions of emotion, participants still observed standardized stimuli in a controlled lab setting in our study. This limits the generalizability of our results as the interpretation of emotional expressions has been shown to be highly context-dependent (Hess & Fischer, 2013; Israelashvili et al., 2019). In contrast to natural scenarios, the same stimuli were also presented repeatedly (three times) in different blocks. While the repeated presentation allowed us to obtain EMG responses without priming participants with emotion category words, learning effects might have occurred. For example, emotion recognition could have been facilitated or expressions could have been perceived as less intense. More importantly, our study did not involve a real social context. Without an interaction partner who receives and responds to expressions from the participant, the social communicative function of emotional expressions, including a bidirectional coordination of affective states (Keltner & Kring, 1998), may get lost (Schilbach et al., 2013). This limitation might also affect trait dimensionspecific modulations in emotion perception. For example, in a real social situation, higher social anxiety levels have been associated with an enhanced mimicry of polite, but not enjoyment smiles (Dijk, Fischer, et al., 2018). Furthermore, ASD was argued to specifically become apparent in alterations in interpersonal dynamics (i.e., during bidirectional information exchange; see Bolis et al., 2018; Peper et al., 2016). Consequently, future studies on emotion perception should be conducted in real social situations that allow for reciprocity and affect coordination.