Page 190 - Demo

Chapter 6188and not emotion recognition accuracy or the confidence therein. Most robust evidence was observed in the association between skin conductance deflections and emotional intensity ratings of sad expressions. That is, higher physiological arousal was only predictive of more intense sadness ratings in individuals with social anxiety. Moreover, using a Bayesian approach, we found evidence for a less pronounced positive link between corrugator activity and emotional intensity ratings in individuals on the autism spectrum compared to controls. This effect was driven by a positive relation between %u201cfrowning%u201d and perceiving angry expressions as emotionally intense, for which there was only weak evidence in the control group. Our exploratory analyses support the idea that self-reported interoceptive accuracy, but not interoceptive attention, might account for group differences in the link between physiological resonance of emotional expressions and their perception. In the remainder of this discussion, we will elaborate on these key findings (see Figure 4 for a visualization).Figure 4. Visualization of significant alterations in the links between measures of physiological resonance and perceived emotional intensity. We used video stimuli which are based on the FEEDTUM database (Wallhoff et al., 2006). Permission to use the material under CC-by and to publish example images in scientific journals, such as in this figure, was granted to the first author of this study by the creators of the database.Alterations in Physiological Resonance to Facial Emotions and Self-Reported InteroceptionWhen exposed to a smile, people automatically mimic it: their zygomaticus muscle activates and their corrugator muscle correspondingly relaxes (Bourgeois & Hess, 2008). In the current study we observed that individuals on the autism spectrum showed a diminished relaxation of their corrugator muscle compared to the control group. Even though group differences in corrugator activity to happy