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Facial Mimicry and Metacognition in Facial Emotion Recognition1214In addition to that, even though our observations on the impact of trait levels can give us hints with regard to alterations in clinical populations, we still collected data from a non-clinical sample. Once clinical symptoms that have a severe impact on an individual%u2019s life come into play, emotion processing might be altered differently, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Half of the participants in our sample had social anxiety trait levels that are considered clinically relevant (i.e., above 30; see Questionnaires section). While these high social anxiety trait levels for non-diagnosed individuals might result in findings that are comparable to clinical populations, this might be less applicable for our results regarding autistic traits. For example, while sadness recognition was observed to be least impacted by autistic trait levels in our study, a reduced perceptual sensitivity has been specifically described for sad facial expressions in individuals on the autism spectrum (Wallace et al., 2011). This emotion-specific recognition impairment has been shown to extend to difficulties in interpreting sadness from animations, which, in turn, has been related to worse daily social functioning in individuals on the autism spectrum (Boraston et al., 2007). Thus, in order to provide meaningful insights, results from studies including healthy participants with variations on clinical trait dimensions should always be confirmed in clinical populations as well as related to actual day-to-day experiences. Moreover, while our sample was not gender-balanced, gender differences in mimicry and its integration in emotion recognition have been reported in past research (Dimberg & Lundquist, 1990; Stel & van Knippenberg, 2008), as well as in autistic traits and social anxiety traits (Caballo et al., 2014; Ruzich et al., 2015). Given the predominance of female participants in our sample, our findings cannot be easily generalized to the male population. Future studies should therefore examine whether similar effects to the ones described in the current study can be observed in a more balanced or even exclusively male sample. Lastly, as we did neither manipulate facial mimicry nor metacognition, our study does not allow for causality assumptions in their role in emotion recognition. Within an emotion processing context, information is likely to flow bidirectionally and recent findings support a context-dependent influence of emotion recognition on facial mimicry (Kastendieck et al., 2021). Furthermore, a more fine-grained investigation of potential mediatory processes in the course of emotion perception and interpretation, such as the integration of interoceptive information (Arnold et al., 2019; Critchley & Garfinkel, 2017a), might benefit the understanding of variability