Page 164 - Demo

Chapter 5162Higher interoceptive accuracy has been associated with more flexibility in the precision of interoceptive prediction errors (i.e., the potential to increase precision via attention) in the predictive coding perspective, whereas extremely precise, inflexible priors have been proposed as source of interoceptive difficulties in autism (Quattrocki & Friston, 2014). These alterations in priors might already, to some degree, be present in non-autistic individuals with high autistic trait levels, as other phenomena that are associated with autism Our findings regarding the differential effect of trait interoceptive accuracy and autistic traits on the link between facial muscle activity and perceived emotional intensity could be interpreted as support for these assumptions: In individuals with high interoceptive accuracy, prediction errors associated with interoceptive signals reflecting facial muscle activations during facial expression observation could have been more influential due to a higher precision via attention. As a consequence, they might have reported perceiving stronger emotional experiences (and potentially also showed stronger physiological reactions), which generalized to neutral expressions. Scoring higher on autistic traits, in contrast, might have been associated with less integration of interoceptive information about facial muscle activations on high-level processing, i.e., in attributing emotionality to observed facial expressions. In those lines, higher confidence in the recognition of neutral expressions might be the product of different processes in relation to autistic traits versus trait interoceptive accuracy. With higher autistic traits, recognition of neutral expressions was indeed better, which could relate to a rule-based path to emotion recognition: Not identifying clear indicators of a specific emotion category could have resulted in higher confidence ratings regarding the categorization of neutral expressions, while undefined physiological arousal could have still resulted in rating them as more intense. Lower confidence in recognizing happy expressions, in contrast, might result from integrating mimicry responses less, which are usually most pronounced for happy facial expressions. General higher confidence ratings with higher trait interoceptive accuracy, and specifically for neutral expressions, could be a result of more strongly perceived physiological feedback which reinforced confidence in all labelling decisions (similar to perceived emotional intensity). These are, however, only assumptions which should be tested more systematically in future studies. Both autistic trait levels as well as interoceptive accuracy modulated the link between instant facial muscle activations and perceived emotional intensity