Page 135 - Demo

Interoception and Facial Emotion Perception1335et al., 1996; Parker et al., 1993) and shows a high prevalence in autism (49.93%; Kinnaird et al., 2019). Studies assessing alexithymia levels in individuals on the autism spectrum provide evidence that alterations in various aspects of emotion processing in autism (Gaigg et al., 2018; Ketelaars et al., 2016), as well as in interoceptive ability (Shah et al., 2016), might indeed be explained by cooccurring high alexithymia levels. Yet, whether a reduced subjective and/or objective interoceptive accuracy would account for difficulties in emotion recognition related to autism remains an open question. In contrast to this potential consequences of a reduced interoceptive accuracy, The heightened interoceptive sensibility in autism, reflecting a hypersensitivity to (specific) bodily signals, has been linked to more severe autism symptomology in specific domains, namely to socio-affective features in children (Palser et al., 2020) as well as to a reduced emotion sensitivity and the occurrence of anxiety symptoms in adults on the autism spectrum (Garfinkel et al., 2016). Thus, learning to regulate and optimally integrate interoceptive information might benefit individuals on the autism spectrum in their daily (social) functioning and experiences. While the amount of literature on clinical interventions in autism focusing on attention to and integration of physiological signals is growing (Gaigg et al., 2020; Quadt et al., 2021), the role of altered interoceptive processing in autism symptomology, including the socio-affective domain, is still scarcely investigated. Individual characteristics associated with autism can be observed in the general population to varying degrees, resulting in claims that individuals on the autism spectrum could be positioned at the extreme of a continuum of autistic traits (Constantino & Todd, 2003; Robinson et al., 2011). This perspective received support by genetic studies (Bralten et al., 2018; Lundstr%u00f6m et al., 2012) as well as studies focusing on behavioural aspects of autism (Mayer, 2017). Accordingly, non-autistic individuals with higher autistic trait levels show, in some regards and to some extent, similar patterns of alterations in processing observed emotional expressions as individuals on the autism spectrum (%u00c5sberg Johnels et al., 2017; Folz et al., 2023; Hermans et al., 2009). Importantly, findings on links between autistic trait levels in non-autistic samples and certain outcomes of interest cannot simply be generalized to autism, let alone to experiences of individuals on the autism spectrum (Sasson & Bottema-Beutel, 2022). They can, however, help forming assumptions on which factors, within processes that show similar