Page 204 - Demo

Chapter 7202(Chapter 6) indexing physiological arousal, to self-reports on facial emotion perception, and by investigating systematic modulations in those links associated with autistic trait levels (Chapter 4 and 5) or an autism diagnosis (Chapter 6). Findings suggest that non-autistic individuals with higher autistic trait levels and individuals on the autism spectrum might integrate changes in their facial muscle activity less in judging the emotional intensity of facial expressions, while there is only sporadic evidence for modulations in the link to emotion recognition accuracy. Importantly, observed effects were neither consistent across emotion categories within a study, nor across studies. The correlational design additionally only allows for interpretations based on plausibility rather than causality. Yet, these observations point out that differences in the sensation, integration and interpretation of internal signals might be a relevant factor in explaining altered (paths to) processing others%u2019 emotions in autism. Self-reported interoception indeed showed to be altered in individuals on the autism spectrum compared to controls but not depending on autistic trait levels in a non-clinical sample. Namely, individuals on the autism spectrum reported to be less accurate in judging their bodily signals while attending to them more strongly (Chapter 6). This is in line with the idea that various distinct bodily signals might be constantly overrepresented in autism but that access to signals of interest is difficult (Van de Cruys et al., 2017). As interoceptive signals are also assumed to influence the processing of others%u2019 emotions, differences in interoceptive abilities may partially explain altered facial emotion perception in autism. Simply speaking, as a result of less reliable information from the body, individuals on the autism spectrum may integrate cues from the body less strongly in the interpretation of emotional expressions. In my study with a clinical sample (Chapter 6), the less pronounced link between a bodily signal (corrugator activity) and the interpretation of an emotional expression (perceived intensity of anger) in autism was not significant anymore after including self-reported interoceptive accuracy, which showed a positive link to the perceived intensity of anger. While this is no direct evidence for the assumed role of interoception in altered facial emotion processing in autism, it still highlights that this perspective is an avenue worthwhile of future investigation. An increasing mechanistic understanding of interoception and its involvement in affective processing, including the bi-directionality of the link between subjective interpretations and bodily signals, builds the foundation for this avenue (Feldman et al., 2024).