Page 189 - Demo

Embodied Facial Emotion Processing in Autism and Social Anxiety1876In the current study, we also observed that perceived emotional intensity in anger displays was more positively linked to Corrugator activity in the NC group compared to the AS group. This could be the result of neurotypical individuals accurately sensing changes in facial muscle configuration and integrating this information in their judgments, whereas lower interoceptive accuracy has been consistently found in individuals on the autism spectrum in past research as well as the current study, potentially resulting in less beneficial facial feedback. To test the role of Interoceptive accuracy in the link between Corrugator activityand Perceived emotional intensity of negative expressions, we re-fitted the model on Perceived emotional intensity of negative expressions with the interactions including Corrugator activity as predictor, and included another three-way interaction term between Emotion category, Corrugator activity and Interoceptive accuracy, as well as the two associated two-way interactions and the main effect of Interoceptive accuracy (see Table S13 in the Supplemental Material for the model fit). In this model, we observed a significant two-way interaction between Interoceptive accuracy and Corrugator activity, F(1,3201) = 3.92, p = .048, with the positive link between Corrugator activity and Perceived emotional intensity being more pronounced with higher Interoceptive accuracy, %u03b2 = 0.03, 95%CI [0.00, 0.06]. As we only observed robust evidence for a difference between the NC and the AS group in the link between Corrugator activity and Perceived emotional intensityof angry expressions, we focused on changes in Bayes factors. At a medium prior specification, the group comparison of the slope dropped to a Bayes factor of 5.21 (versus 12.76 in the original model) and there was not even anecdotal evidence for a positive slope in the NC group (BF = 0.58). Hence, the addition of Interoceptive accuracy to the model seemed to have partially accounted for group differences in how strongly %u201cfrowning%u201d related to perceiving an angry expression as more emotionally intense. DiscussionThe goal of the current study was to investigate alterations in the links between physiological responses to facial emotional expressions and emotion perception in individuals on the autism spectrum and individuals with social anxiety, compared to neurotypical individuals. Overall, we identified group differences in the links between physiological measures and perceived emotional intensity ratings,