Page 192 - Demo

Chapter 6190attenuate irrelevant signals and amplify the relevant signal against the noise, thus resulting in inaccurate judgments. Our observation of lower self-reported interoceptive accuracy in individuals with social anxiety is partially in line with the existing findings on objectively measured cardiac interoception: While one study found no differences in cardiac interoceptive accuracy in individuals with social anxiety compared to control participants (Antony et al., 1995), another study described a worse performance in the cardiac interoception task (Gaebler et al., 2013). A biased perception of physiological signals, namely an overperception of arousal, has been reported in previous social anxiety research (Edelmann & Baker, 2002). Possibly, an awareness of these biases may be reflected in decreased selfreported interoceptive accuracy.Alterations in Facial Emotion PerceptionIn line with previous research, we observed lower emotion recognition accuracies in individuals on the autism spectrum compared to the control participants (Uljarevic & Hamilton, 2013; Yeung, 2022) as well as lower perceived emotional intensities (Schneider et al., 2020; Tseng et al., 2014). Contrasting past findings, confidence in the recognition of all facial expressions (including neutral) was also reduced in individuals on the autism spectrum compared to neurotypical controls (Sawyer et al., 2014; S. Wang & Adolphs, 2017). These lower confidence ratings might reflect the observed difficulties in labeling expressions, which might also be linked to perceiving less emotionality in them. Against our expectations, we did not observe reduced confidence in emotion recognition in individuals with social anxiety. There was only some evidence for lower confidence in the recognition of sad expressions, which was in line with their somewhat lower recognition rates. Although individuals with social anxiety are known to be negatively biased in forming beliefs about their social abilities (Koban et al., 2023; M%u00fcller-Pinzler et al., 2019), these beliefs might not manifest in a non-social setting such as in our experiment. Similarly, we did not observe a reflection of the proposed negativity bias in social anxiety (Chen, Short, et al., 2020; Machado-de-Sousa et al., 2010) in the subjective facial emotion perception measures, such as an improved recognition of negative expressions, higher misperception of neutral expressions or increased intensity ratings of expressions. While results from previous studies in sub-clinical individuals with varying social anxiety trait levels (Folz et al., 2023; Torro-Alves et al., 2016) as well as in clinical samples (Bui et al., 2017) suggest that the negativity bias might not impact the correct labeling of expressions per se, we would have