Page 209 - Demo

General Discussion20775). Furthermore, against my expectation, neither subjectively-reported nor objectively-measured interoception predicted how well emotional expressions are recognized. Yet, self-reported interoceptive accuracy did play a role when it came to the link between actual physiological changes linked to viewing expressions and their perceived emotional intensity (Chapter 5 and Chapter 6). Namely, people with higher trait interoceptive accuracy seem to integrate the strength of changes in their facial muscle activity more in perceived emotion expression intensity ratings, even if the muscle activity does not reflect mimicry patterns (Chapter 5). Whether this reflects a higher sensitivity to muscle changes (low-level) or a stronger integration of interoceptive signals in cognitive processing (higher level) is one of the many questions which will keep interoception researchers busy in the future.Methodological ConsiderationsThe studies in this thesis encompass different populations (students, general public, individuals with clinical diagnoses), different experimental settings (online, public spaces, laboratory), different emotion-processing tasks (dot-probe, passive viewing of facial emotional expressions, facial emotion recognition), different stimuli (static and acted facial/bodily expressions, static and manipulated facial emotion cues, dynamic and spontaneous facial expressions) and different analysis methods (e.g., Frequentist versus Bayesian analyses). As a result of applying a wide variety of methods and comparing findings across studies, this thesis provides relevant methodological insights in studying (alterations in) facial emotion perception.First and foremost, I initially conducted studies in non-clinical and mainly student samples, before testing my hypotheses in a study with a clinical sample. This is common practice in clinical research, in order to identify relevant processes, formulate hypotheses and adjust paradigms if necessary (e.g., Pollmann et al., 2010). By only involving clinical populations after careful pilot studies, the burden for these participants, who are vulnerable and difficult to recruit, is aimed to be reduced. Nevertheless, especially when formulating hypotheses based on non-clinical pilot studies, researchers automatically follow the assumption that clinical samples mainly differ from non-clinical samples with varying clinical