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Interoception and Facial Emotion Perception1415 As additional analyses, we explored relations between Autistic traits and Interoceptive sensibility as well as between Interoceptive sensibility and Emotion recognition accuracy. As no significant effects related to autistic trait levels were observed and these analyses were exploratory, the models are reported in the Supplemental Materials (see Tables S10 - S12) and not discussed in detail here. ResultsMain AnalysisWe did not find evidence for trait interoceptive accuracy mediating the effect of autistic traits on emotion recognition (see Figure 2). As only recognition of angry expressions showed to be worse with higher autistic trait levels, (path c, see Figure 4A and Table 2 for the slope comparisons, as well as Table S1 in the Supplemental Materials for the full model fit), we tested for an indirect effect of Trait interoceptive accuracy on the association between Autistic Traits and Emotion recognition accuracy of angry expressions (path ab). Confidence limits included zero, indicating no mediated effect (see Figure 2). Thus, autistic traits predicted worse recognition of angry faces only directly. Against our expectations, Autistic traits was not a significant predictor of Trait interoceptive accuracy in our second model (path a, see Table S3 in the Supplemental Material), and neither Trait interoceptive accuracy nor its interaction with Emotion category were significant in predicting Emotion recognition accuracy (path b, see Table S5 in the Supplemental Material). An exclusion of Alexithymia from all models including Autistic traits as predictor did not result in a meaningful change of the outcomes. All model fits, including significant effects that are unrelated to our predictors of interest, can be found in Tables S1-5 in the Supplemental Materials. Figure 2. Results of the mediation analysis in Experiment 1 with trait interoceptive accuracy as potential mediator explaining worse recognition of angry faces with higher autistic trait levels. ** p < .001