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Chapter 6192Individuals with social anxiety, in contrast, showed a more pronounced positive link between changes in skin conductance and perceived emotional intensity of sad expressions than the control participants. Specifically for sad expressions, mimicry of autonomic responses has been shown to influence facial emotion perception (see Critchley, 2009). As bodily arousal is typically overperceived in social situations by individuals with social anxiety (e.g., Shalom et al., 2015), increased attention to changes in skin conductance in response to sad expressions might explain the stronger link with intensity ratings. However, when including self-reported interoceptive attention in the analysis, there was no indication that it would account for the group differences. An alternative explanation could be that the link between physiological arousal and perceived intensity was more strongly pronounced in the social anxiety group compared to the control group because they had more difficulties in identifying sad expressions, as reflected in the decreased confidence and recognition rates. Similar to claims on the role of facial mimicry in processing observed emotional expressions (e.g., Wood et al., 2016), autonomic feedback, such as changes in skin conductance, might specifically inform facial emotion perception if expressions are ambiguous in the eyes of the perceiver. Whether the ambiguity of emotional expressions could indeed explain differences in how physiological signals relate to facial emotion perception should be investigated in future research.LimitationsWhile the current study provides valuable contributions to existing research on facial emotion perception, physiological resonance of facial expressions and interoception in autism and social anxiety, and additionally provides novel insights in condition-specific modulations in their relations, some limitations should be highlighted. One limitation is that we can only assume that physiological changes would inform facial emotion perception based on previous research (e.g., Critchley et al., 2005) but we could not infer causality in our study. This general shortcoming of studies relating co-occurrent changes in physiology to subjective reports (Olszanowski et al., 2020) has recently been addressed in novel approaches, such as directly manipulating facial muscle activity via facial neuromuscular electrical stimulation (Efthimiou et al., 2023). Thereby, alterations in processing and integrating physiological signals could also be further disentangled from alterations in physiological reactivity within the channel of interest. In those lines, the role of interoception in alterations in emotion perception should be