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Chapter 7216with heightened stress levels in interactions, such as fidgeting, seem to form an exception here. If those behaviours are spontaneously shown by individuals with social anxiety, controls as interaction partners have a strong tendency to adopt them. This observation resulted in the claim that negative behaviours and experiences, as expression of social anxiety, would be contagious in interactions with individuals with social anxiety (Heerey & Kring, 2007; Park et al., 2010; Shaw et al., 2021), whereas the reciprocity of positive affect would be reduced (see also Pearlstein et al., 2019). Next to observable behaviours, past research has specifically highlighted alignment in autonomic nervous system measures (i.e., physiological synchrony) as indicator of affiliation (attraction; Prochazkova et al., 2021) as well as prosocial behaviour (i.e., cooperation; Behrens et al., 2020) in social interactions. Despite the known alterations in non-verbal signal processing in autism and social anxiety, only few studies with clinical samples have looked at alterations in physiological synchrony in interactions. In parent-child interactions, in which physiological synchrony is most commonly researched in autism, physiological synchrony seems to be lower if the child has an autism diagnosis, compared to controls, and if the symptomology is more severe (Baker et al., 2015; H. Wang et al., 2021). Modulations in physiological synchrony between an individual with social anxiety and a control, compared to two controls, seem to depend on the content of a conversation: while closeness-generating conversations typically elicit higher physiological synchrony in controls, synchrony is reduced with higher social anxiety levels in dyads with a member with social anxiety (Asher et al., 2020, 2021). Yet, little is known about the role of altered automatic alignment in physiology and its direct relations to social behaviour in interactions between individuals on the autism spectrum or individuals with social anxiety and controls. To address this gap in the literature, I developed a non-verbal, interactive trust game paradigm together with my colleague Fabiola Diana and the engineer Elio Sjak-Shie, in which the visibility of the previously unknown interaction partner could be manipulated. The employment of various measures, such as eyetracking, video recordings, self-reports, heart rate and skin conductance, allows us to track the exchange of visible signals, associated physiological changes and subjective experiences, as well as their link to behaviour in a trust context. While data collection with the clinical subsamples is still ongoing, preliminary analyses of the role of autistic traits and social anxiety traits in the control group offer interesting preliminary insights (Folz et al., 2024). Looking at the self-reported