Page 145 - Demo

Interoception and Facial Emotion Perception1435The same was the case for Interoceptive sensibility. For neutral expressions, we did, however, find robust evidence for a positive estimated slope at average Trait interoceptive accuracy, slope = 0.03, 95% HPD [0.00, 0.06], and %u201chigh%u201d (mean + 1SD) Trait interoceptive accuracy, slope = 0.03, 95% HPD [0.00, 0.06], with both Highest Posterior Density (HPD) intervals excluding zero. Thus, specifically when evaluating neutral expressions, individuals with a higher Trait interoceptive accuracy were more confident in their decisions (see Figure 4E). DiscussionAs expected, we found evidence for a reduced emotion recognition performance with higher autistic trait levels. Yet, only angry facial expressions were significantly less recognized in our experiment. Furthermore, against our hypotheses, higher autistic traits were not associated with a lower trait interoceptive accuracy, both when and when not controlling for alexithymia. Trait interoceptive accuracy was also neither directly linked to emotion recognition accuracy nor had an indirect effect in the association between autistic traits and recognition of angry expressions. The exploratory analyses, however, showed that individuals with higher trait interoceptive accuracy were more confident in judging neutral expressions, and that both neutral and sad expressions were perceived as more emotionally intense with higher interoceptive sensibility. Autistic traits, in contrast, were neither associated with alterations in confidence judgment nor in perceived intensity of emotional expressions. Taken together, trait interoceptive accuracy did not play a role in altered emotion recognition with higher autistic trait levels, and was not even directly related to emotion recognition outcomes. Yet, interoception might still have an influence on emotion processing as interoceptive sensibility, that is the subjective awareness of bodily signals, affected the perceived intensity of some facial expressions, and trait interoceptive accuracy was linked to confidence ratings associated with recognizing neutral expressions. Being performed in an online setting, we had no insights in an individual%u2019s objective interoceptive accuracy as well as their physiological responses to the facial emotional expressions in Experiment 1. These limitations were addressed in Experiment 2 (see Figure 1).