Page 195 - Demo
P. 195
Embodied Facial Emotion Processing in Autism and Social Anxiety1936more thoroughly investigated. In our study, we assessed group differences in interoception by using broad, high-level and belief-based measures whereas most previous studies assessed interoceptive accuracy objectively instead of or in addition to self-reports (Gaebler et al., 2013; Garfinkel et al., 2016). Crucially, in order to fully understand individual differences in interoception, a more comprehensive assessment has been called for, across different dimensions and bodily axes (Suksasilp & Garfinkel, 2022). The generalizability of our results is additionally limited by the heterogeneity within the clinical conditions (e.g., see comorbidities in Table S1 in the Supplemental Materials), by the unequal gender distribution, as well as by the relatively low ecological validity. For example, differences in processing social signals in social anxiety might be further emphasized by alterations in behaviour in real social situations, such as attentional avoidance of social signals (Konovalova et al., 2021). Lastly, it should be highlighted that, despite finding some evidence for altered links between physiological signals and facial emotion perception in the two conditions, these results were highly specific. In most cases, the Bayesian analyses confirmed the null hypotheses, thus supporting the absence of group differences.ConclusionAltered integration of embodied emotional states has, to date, received little attention as potential mechanism of altered facial emotion perception in autism and social anxiety. Our study provides first insights in alterations in the link between physiological responses to facial emotion expressions and their perception. The results show that perceived emotional intensity of specific expressions was more strongly linked to physiological arousal in individuals with social anxiety compared to control participants, whereas it was less strongly linked to congruent facial muscle activations in individuals on the autism spectrum. Whether physiological resonance in terms of arousal has indeed a stronger weight in individuals with social anxiety and whether facial feedback is indeed less strongly integrated compared to neurotypical controls when interpreting emotionality in other%u2019s facial expressions should be examined further in future research.