Page 163 - Demo

Interoception and Facial Emotion Perception1615or mediated the negative relation between autistic trait levels and recognition of specific facial expressions. Facial muscle responses were not less predictive of emotion recognition accuracy with higher autistic trait levels as found in a previous study. While our initial hypotheses were not supported in the current study, the findings, nevertheless, offer further insights into the conceptualisation of interoception, its potential role in facial emotion perception as well as putative interoceptive alterations associated with autistic trait levels within this context.Contradicting previous findings (Murphy et al., 2020), cardiac interoceptive accuracy, measured via the heartbeat discrimination task, was not associated with trait interoceptive accuracy, measured via the interoceptive accuracy scale, in the current study. The use of classic cardiac interoception tasks to assess interoceptive accuracy has recently been heavily criticized. They are likely to be confounded by the reliance on additional cognitive processes (Hickman et al., 2020; Ring & Brener, 2018) and only focus on one interoceptive domain (i.e., cardioception) as well as few dimensions of interoception, neglecting its multidomain and multidimensional nature (Suksasilp & Garfinkel, 2022). The few previous studies comparing the performance of individuals on the autism spectrum to nonautistic controls in heartbeat discrimination tasks did not find a robustly reduced interoceptive accuracy (Z. J. Williams et al., 2023). We did not find a significant negative relationship between cardiac interoceptive accuracy and autistic trait levels in our non-autistic sample either, and, unexpectedly, also no relations between self-reported measures of interoception (i.e., accuracy and sensibility) and autistic traits. Importantly, the expectations on links between interoception measures and autistic trait levels in our non-autistic sample were based on results of studies with individuals on the autism spectrum, who might differ in their interoceptive processing. Alexithymia, in contrast, showed the expected negative relation to trait interoceptive accuracy. While recent perspectives claim that alexithymia might underlie emotion recognition difficulties in autism, our findings on links between autistic traits and all emotion recognition task outcomes in a nonautistic sample did, not change depending on whether alexithymia was included as control predictor or not. Whether alexithymia does play a role in altered facial emotion recognition with higher autistic trait levels in non-autistic individuals, or whether it might only become relevant in autism is to be further investigated.