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General Discussion2037Alterations in Facial Emotion Processing Associated with Social Anxiety (Trait Levels)A heightened sensitivity to negative social-evaluative cues is central to cognitivebehavioral theoretical models on the development and maintenance of Social Anxiety Disorder (Heimberg et al., 2010; Hofmann, 2007; Rapee & Heimberg, 1997; Spence & Rapee, 2016). Evidence for this sensitivity has been previously established at early attentional stages in individuals with clinically diagnosed social anxiety, and also in individuals with heightened social anxiety but no diagnosis (Bantin et al., 2016b). Contrasting this literature, I did not find evidence that individuals with higher social anxiety trait levels would generally show an enhanced attentional bias towards angry faces (i.e., social threat; Chapter 2). Only when autistic trait levels were simultaneously low, higher social anxiety trait levels were associated with a stronger bias towards social threat. In those lines, some research indicates that, within a group of clinically relevant social anxiety trait levels, individuals differ in emotion-related attentional processes (Neophytou & Panayiotou, 2022). A more comprehensive picture of altered attention to emotions associated with social anxiety (traits) should therefore be obtained by considering additional individual characteristics that could explain variation within a sample of individuals with social anxiety, such as autistic trait levels.Social anxiety was further not observed to be consistently related to differences in physiological responses to facial emotional expressions, both in a non-clinical and in a clinical sample. Similar to most previous research with inconclusive findings, these studies were conducted in laboratory settings. As physiological arousal, its perception and control over its expression seem to be altered specifically in real social contexts in social anxiety (Edelmann & Baker, 2002; Nikoli%u0107 et al., 2015), most literature to date, including our studies, might not have been able to capture alterations in physiological responses to emotional expressions in real life. Chapter 6 indeed confirmed via self-reports that the sensation of physiological states in real life would differ between individuals with social anxiety and control participants. Individuals with social anxiety tend to attend to their bodily signals more while being less accurate in judging them. Higher interoceptive attention did, however, not play a role in the link between physiological arousal and perceived intensity of sad expressions, which was more strongly pronounced in individuals with social anxiety compared to controls (Chapter 6). Whether altered interoceptive processing might explain altered perception and potentially also altered