Page 212 - Demo

Chapter 7210those studies. Although my studies remained consistent in the usage of stimuli after their development, different variations of the facial emotion recognition task were created by changing the task demands.In two chapters of this thesis (Chapter 4 and Chapter 5), I investigated modulations in facial mimicry and in its link to facial emotion perception by autistic trait levels in a non-clinical student population. In Chapter 4, facial mimicry was significantly associated with facial emotion recognition, and this link was modulated by autistic trait levels for sad expressions. In Chapter 5, in contrast, there was no evidence for such a link, let alone for a modulation by autistic trait levels. Findings linking facial mimicry to emotion recognition are known to be inconsistent (Holland et al., 2020), and our observations could provide a potential explanation: In Chapter 5, task demands (i.e., labeling the expressions among others) were already known to the participants during the viewing of the expressions, with the ratings directly appearing after each expression. Chapter 4, on the contrary, consisted of a separate passive viewing phase (during which facial muscle activations were measured) and a subsequent labelling phase (during which the expressions were rated). When not being primed with task demands, leaving more ambiguity, people might show more spontaneous mimicry (i.e., without having potential responses pre-activated), which could be integrated in later qualitative judgments of expressions. When all potential categories and the task to judge expressions according to those are already known during viewing, people might rather match activated mental representation to the presented stimuli (Keating & Cook, 2023). While qualitative interpretations might be less influenced by bodily feedback in this scenario, it might still reinforce quantitative judgments about the intensity of an observed emotional experience or the confidence in making the qualitative judgment. This might specifically be the case for people with higher (self-reported) interoceptive accuracy, as described in the Chapters 5 and 6. Although these assumptions still need to be tested, researchers should be aware that apparently small changes in experimental paradigms might have the potential to activate different processing modes.Lastly, in an attempt to model the data of each study best, I employed a variety of analysis methods. In my studies, effects of interest were mainly rather small and presented themselves in complex three-way-interactions. Multi-level modeling allowed me to include multiple observations of each participant, while accounting