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General Discussion2157the medial ethics committee and the Covid-19 pandemic, I eventually conducted most of my studies in a laboratory setting using computerized, non-interactive tasks. As a consequence, the current thesis is limited in the degree to which it can capture alterations in facial emotion processing in real life. For example, individuals with higher social anxiety trait levels seem to avoid staring at another person that is physically present more compared to individuals with lower social anxiety traits (Howell et al., 2016; Konovalova et al., 2021). In contrast, the effect of being watched by others is suggested to be less pronounced in individuals on the autism spectrum, as a result of less self-referential processing elicited by less mentalizing (Ca%u00f1igueral & Hamilton, 2019). Differential attention to others in reallife situations might thus contribute to alterations in the processing of their (facial) emotional expressions. Furthermore, responses to others seem to be differentially modulated by the presence of a real social context in social anxiety versus autism: While individuals with social anxiety control their (emotional) expressions more strongly in social situations, including when mimicking others%u2019 facial expressions (Dijk, Fischer, et al., 2018), individuals on the autism spectrum seem to adjust their behavior less according to social norms compared to controls (Izuma et al., 2011). Cognitive biases elicited by a real social context are thought to create an even stronger effect on behaviour in social anxiety, whereas audience effects in autism seem to be weaker. Across the chapters of this thesis, I only observed limited evidence for alterations in facial emotion processing associated with social anxiety (trait levels). Whether alterations in social anxiety or high social anxiety trait levels become more apparent in real social settings, and whether the presence of others influences facial emotion processing less in autism, compared to controls, should be investigated in future studies. Going beyond effects of other individuals%u2019 physical presence, studies employing face-to-face interaction paradigms allow to capture bi-directional dynamics in the perception and responding to spontaneous expressions of interaction partners. Decreased spontaneous coordination of behaviours (often referred to as %u201cinterpersonal synchrony%u201d) has been identified in interactions between individuals on the autism spectrum and controls (Georgescu et al., 2019; Peper et al., 2016), and even considered a diagnostic marker of autism (Koehler et al., 2022). In contrast, coordination in movements between individuals with social anxiety and controls has specifically been found to be less synchronous when it was intentional, and not spontaneous (Varlet et al., 2014). Non-verbal behaviours associated