Page 161 - Demo

Interoception and Facial Emotion Perception1595analysis indicated that these seemingly contradicting findings might be the result of integrating actual physiological signals more or less strongly, respectively, in emotional intensity judgments. Confidence in rating happy expressions, in contrast, decreased with higher autistic trait levels. Expanding our models by including objective measures of interoceptive accuracy or physiological changes (i.e., facial muscle responses) in Experiment 2 did not aid to explain emotion recognition accuracy, as well as potential alterations with higher autistic trait levels. Our measure of interoceptive accuracy was also not related to subjective interoceptive accuracy, or any other interoception measure. General DiscussionTaken the results of our two experiments together, we did not find evidence for either self-reported (trait) or objective (cardiac) interoceptive accuracy explaining modulations in emotion recognition accuracy linked to autistic trait levels. While we did observe lower recognition performance for distinct emotional expressions with higher autistic trait levels, we did not find systematic differences in accuracy linked to individuals%u2019 interoceptive abilities. Trait interoceptive accuracy (and interoceptive sensibility in Experiment 1) was rather linked to confidence in emotion recognition as well as the perceived emotional intensity of observed expressions. In contrast to a previous study, facial muscle responses were not predictive of accurately recognizing specific emotional expressions, and the relation between facial muscle responses and emotion recognition accuracy was not altered by an individual%u2019s autistic trait levels in the current lab study. Our exploratory analyses, however, indicated that facial muscle activations might be more or less strongly linked to the perceived emotional intensity of an observed expressions, depending on an individuals%u2019 trait interoceptive accuracy and autistic trait levels respectively. Thus, as physiological responses and their sensation seem to play a role in altered facial emotion processing in non-autistic individuals with higher autistic trait levels, an examination of their relevance in altered facial emotion processing in autism might yield promising insights. In line with our expectations, we found some evidence for reduced emotion recognition performance with higher autistic trait levels in our non-autistic sample. Yet, the effect was specific to certain emotion categories and differed between