Page 136 - Demo

Chapter 5134patterns of alterations in autism and high autistic trait levels, might be relevant to further examine in autism (Pollmann et al., 2010).Objectives of the Current StudyWe investigated the role of interoception and facial mimicry in emotion processing in relation to autistic trait levels in two pre-registered experiments with non-autistic individuals (see Figure 1): The first, online experiment consisted of a facial emotion recognition task with confidence judgments in the accuracy of recognition and intensity ratings of seen expressions as well as questionnaires on autistic traits, trait interoceptive accuracy and interoceptive sensibility. Social anxiety traits and alexithymia were assessed as control variables given that both have been related to alterations in interoception (Desai et al., 2019; Stevens et al., 2011), as well as difficulties in the socio-affective domain in autism (Mul et al., 2018; Spain et al., 2018). In our main analysis, we examined whether a reduced trait interoceptive accuracy would explain a reduced emotion recognition accuracy with higher autistic trait levels, while controlling for alexithymia and social anxiety traits. In the second, lab-based experiment, we expanded the online study. Next to assessing the same measures as in the online experiment for replication purposes, we added facial electromyography recordings during the emotion recognition task. This allowed us to investigate a second factor which could play a role in reduced emotion recognition with higher autistic trait levels: We tested whether physiological responses to others%u2019 facial expressions (i.e., facial mimicry) were less predictive of emotion recognition accuracy with higher autistic trait levels as found in a previous study for sad facial expressions (Folz et al., 2023). By adding a heartbeat discrimination task to the lab experiment, we could further explore whether autistic traits would be linked to lower cardiac interoceptive accuracy and/or a stronger mismatch between subjective and objective measures of interoception (interoceptive trait prediction error).