Page 215 - Demo

General Discussion2137in my research as well as reduced objective interoceptive accuracy in previous work (Garfinkel et al., 2016; Z. J. Williams et al., 2023). Preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of interoceptive training (Aligning Dimensions of Interoceptive Experience, ADIE), specifically targeting the dimension of accurately sensing bodily signals, has already been described in a randomized controlled trial with individuals on the autism spectrum (Quadt et al., 2021). Outcomes specifically related to being aware of one%u2019s emotions did not significantly change between the ADIE training group and the active control group, but seemed to improve for both groups. This might be explained by the type of training which the active control group received, namely recognizing and matching emotional prosody. Next to a reduced interoceptive accuracy, individuals on the autism spectrum also report an increased attention to bodily signals (Chapter 6) and difficulties in integrating and interpreting them (Fiene et al., 2018). Interventions that focus on mindfulness or the appraisal of bodily signals might be a promising avenue to improve interoceptive abilities at these specific interoceptive dimensions (Heim et al., 2023). Hence, training interoceptive abilities at different dimension directly within, or at least linking to, an emotion recognition context could facilitate a more embodied path to emotion recognition in autism. Across studies, we only find little alterations in facial emotion processing associated with higher social anxiety trait levels or clinically diagnosed social anxiety compared to controls. Although the absence of evidence does not translate into evidence of absence, it seems unlikely that profound differences within the studies have not been identified. Hence, within laboratory settings, individuals with social anxiety (or high trait levels) might not differ in the way they process emotional expressions. Bodily responses to others%u2019 expressions as well as their integration in judging their emotionality might also be relatively similar, apart from a stronger integration of physiological arousal when judgments are more difficult. Importantly, especially in social anxiety, processing other%u2019s emotions in a real social context differs from processing them in a lab context (Dijk, Fischer, et al., 2018). In real contexts, cognitive biases are assumed to be activated that, among others, lead to a vigilance to social-evaluative cues (emotional expressions) and an increased perception of physiological arousal (Heimberg et al., 2014). Here, findings a higher sensitivity to negative facial expressions compared to controls is highly likely. Moreover, an embodied path to emotion recognition might become maladaptive, as too much self-related physiological arousal could be