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General Discussion2057Robust evidence for alterations in both the subjective experience of others%u2019 facial emotions and physiological responses linked to those expressions was not observed in social anxiety (or high social anxiety trait levels). I did, however, observe that physiological arousal was more predictive of the perceived intensity of sad expressions in individuals with social anxiety compared to controls. Sad expressions were also the only expression type for which individuals with social anxiety demonstrated lower confidence compared to controls in one experiment (Chapter 6). Hence, individuals with social anxiety might specifically rely on bodily signals to inform interpretations of other%u2019s expressions, if those are more difficult to identify. Importantly, expressions are often ambiguous in real situations (Aviezer et al., 2017) and individuals with social anxiety perceive physiological arousal, at the same time, more strongly (Edelmann & Baker, 2002). Following an embodied path to facial emotion perception in real-life settings could therefore also become maladaptive for individuals with social anxiety as they may judge others%u2019 emotions as more intense than actually displayed.Contributions to the Facial Emotion Processing LiteratureNext to expanding the knowledge on altered facial emotion perception in autism and social anxiety specifically, the current thesis also provides more fundamental insights into processing others%u2019 emotional expressions (in a non-clinical population). In line with their social-communicative function, the accumulated findings of this thesis underline the importance of non-verbal emotional expressions for human observers: They receive prioritized visual attention (Chapter 2) and are reliably recognized, when displayed via the face or the body (Chapter 3), and as static (Chapter 3) or dynamic facial stimuli (Chapter 4-6). Happy facial expressions seem to take a unique role within the distinct expression categories in that they are consistently recognized best (up to a ceiling performance) across studies (Chapter 3-6). As survival-relevant emotions are predominantly communicated via the face (App et al., 2011), the advantage in recognizing happy facial expressions (Kret, Stekelenburg, et al., 2013; Martinez et al., 2016) might reflect a motive that is highly relevant for survival in our modern society, namely affiliation. Accordingly, happy facial expressions are also most strongly, and almost exclusively, mimicked (Chapter 3 and Chapter 4), following the assumption that people would mainly mimic expressions promoting affiliation(A. Fischer & Hess, 2017). Whether mimicry of happy facial expressions would help their recognition, via sensorimotor simulation (Wood et al., 2016), could unfortunately not be evaluated within