Page 160 - Demo

Chapter 5158fits were in line with our original findings: Facial muscle activity remained not predictive of emotion recognition accuracy, and autistic traits did not modulate the relation between the two. Mirroring the results of the exploratory analysis, both gaussianized Corrugator activity and gaussianized Zygomaticus activity were less predictive of Perceived emotional intensity with higher Autistic traits, while, with higher Trait interoceptive accuracy, gaussianized Zygomaticus activity was more predictive of Perceived emotional intensity (see Tables S25 and S26 in the Supplemental Materials). Lastly, we aimed to investigate potential systematic effects of response biases in evaluating emotion recognition accuracy in both experiments. Therefore, we calculated each participant%u2019s Unbiased Hit Rates (i.e., Hu scores; Wagner, 1993) for each emotion category and predicted those by Autistic traits, mirroring the first model fits of the mediator models (see Supplemental Materials for more information). Links between Autistic traits and Unbiased Hit Rates were similar to the results of the main analysis in Experiment 1, whereas there was no evidence for less accurate recognition of sad facial expression with higher Autistic traits in Experiment 2 when looking at Unbiased Hit Rates.DiscussionIn the lab study, we could replicate most of the observations that were made in the online study (Experiment 1): First, we did not find evidence for trait interoceptive accuracy being a mediator in the link between autistic trait levels and emotion recognition accuracy, neither being a direct predictor of recognition accuracy. Surprisingly, while accuracy also showed to be reduced with higher autistic trait levels for a specific emotion, this specific emotion was sadness and not anger (as in Experiment 1). Further, recognition of neutral expressions was even increased with higher autistic trait levels in Experiment 2. In line with Experiment 1, higher trait interoceptive accuracy was also linked to a higher perceived intensity of neutral expressions, as well as more confidence in their recognition. In contrast to Experiment 1, we did not find an effect of interoceptive sensibility on perceived emotional intensity. Instead, we found significant effects of autistic traits on the perceived emotional intensity of neutral expressions, as well as on the confidence in recognizing them. Similarly to the results linked to interoceptive accuracy, neutral expressions were rated higher in emotional intensity and confidence in rating them correctly was increased with higher autistic trait levels. Our exploratory