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Chapter 5164explained by differences in the experimental setting and the addition of measures (i.e., questionnaires, physiological recordings and tasks). Furthermore, the sample in Experiment 1 was likely more varied in terms of education and lifestyle than the sample in Experiment 2. Thirty percent of the participants in Experiment 1 were not directly recruited at Leiden university whereas we exclusively recruited at Leiden university for Experiment 2. Participants in both experiments were, nevertheless, majorly female young adults, which limits the generalizability of our results. Age and gender differences have been reported with regard to emotion perception and interoception measures (Grabauskait%u0117 et al., 2017), next to gender differences in autistic traits (Ruzich et al., 2015). Future experiments should therefore not only examine whether our findings could be extended to a clinical population (i.e., individuals with an autism spectrum diagnosis), but also more diverse non-autistic samples. While limitations of the heartbeat discrimination task have already been addressed earlier, computerized emotion recognition tasks can never fully reflect emotion recognition in a naturalistic context. By adding task demands to the perception of facial expressions, spontaneous reactions might be altered and processing of expressions might be biased. An experimental context, which requires labelling of facial expressions and already provides categories for it, might activate a top-down mode and reinforce a specific path to emotion recognition, such as visual matching with mental representations (Keating & Cook, 2023). Bodily responses might thus not act as simulations of specific emotional states but rather reinforce perceived emotionality and confidence in one%u2019s decisions in people with higher self-reported interoceptive abilities. Whether interoception could become a relevant factor in emotion recognition in daily life, and whether the path to emotion recognition involving interoception is less commonly used in individuals with higher autistic trait levels (or on the autism spectrum), still needs to be further investigated with more ecologically valid and naturalistic paradigms.Many different paths can lead to recognizing another person%u2019s emotion based on their facial expression. Feedback from our own bodies might be one of them, which might be less strongly pronounced in autism. In the current study, we did not find support for reduced interoceptive accuracy explaining worse emotion recognition performance with higher autistic trait levels. Nevertheless, higher trait interoceptive accuracy (and sensibility) resulted in more confidence in labelling expressions as well as in higher perceived emotional intensity ratings of expressions with little or no visual indication of emotionality. Based on the