Page 214 - Demo

Chapter 7212and Master%u2019s education, I became more and more aware of how different people%u2019s experiences in our shared world can be, given their past experiences but also their predispositions. By nature, people have different ways to process their environment and this environment, in turn, influences how they will perceive future environments. Our actions are strongly intertwined with our perceptions, which can explain why others sometimes seem to act %u201cweird%u201d to us: they just differ in their way of processing what is happening in the world, including their own selves, and have a different action repertoire linked to that. In our society, mental disorders as well as neurodevelopmental conditions, are a framework to classify differences that have a significant impact on the life of an individual or the people around them. Within the present thesis, I am looking at an everyday process in which people differ and which has consequences for coordinating our social world, namely making sense of other people%u2019s emotions. Here, I specifically examine systematic differences in their processing at different stages, including different levels of description, related to autism and social anxiety. Learning about these differences allows us to (1) acknowledge diversity in processing social information and understand unexpected responses and (2) identify under which circumstances specific processing styles might be more beneficial than others and how those could be promoted. Hence, instead of judging the %u201ctypicality%u201d of others%u2019 behaviors and trying to tune them to behaving %u201ctypical%u201d, our interactions can benefit from being more sensitive to others%u2019 differences and mutually attuning to reach a better understanding.That being said, there might be situations in which different ways of processing social information, as observed in autism and social anxiety, contribute to difficulties in navigating the social world. For example, while matching perceived emotional expressions to visual mental representations might work well for clear exemplars, many expressions in daily life are highly variable, mixed and ambiguous (Aviezer et al., 2017). Here, rather than comparing those to existing visual mental representations, it may be more beneficial to include different information in their interpretation, such as from embodied simulations. Although causality as well as the exact mechanisms still need to be established, my research indicates that this type of information is less integrated in processing others%u2019 emotions in autism (and high autistic trait levels). A less accurate sensation of relevant bodily signals, or their prioritization (Van de Cruys et al., 2017) might be one relevant factor here, as indicated by the reduced self-reported interoceptive accuracy