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1General introduction23social anxiety (e.g., attention, interpretation), affecting different levels of description (e.g., experience, physiology). Importantly, the covered processing stages and levels in this dissertation are neither conclusive nor do they occur in a consecutive or hierarchical order, as one might infer. Understanding others%u2019 emotions is a highly complex, dynamic and versatile phenomenon, in which various individual and environmental factors can play a role.Resonance of Observed Emotional Expressions in Autism and Social AnxietyHumans %u201cfeel%u201d emotions in their bodies: they consistently link distinct bodily states to specific emotional states (Nummenmaa et al., 2014). In those lines, various seminal emotion theories, such as the James-Lange-Theory (James, 1884; Lange & Kurella, 1887) or the Somatic Marker Hypothesis (Damasio, 1996) among others (e.g., Levenson, 2003), highlight the role of physiological feedback in the experience of emotions. Here, automatically evoked activity changes in targets of both the somatic nervous system (e.g., facial muscles) and the autonomic nervous system (e.g., the heart) can inform consciously experienced emotional states (Buck, 1980; Critchley, 2009). Next to emotion-specific facial muscle configurations (Friesen & Ekman, 1983), distinct emotional states also show consistent (de-)activations in different measures of autonomic nervous system activity (Friedman, 2010; Kreibig, 2010; Levenson, 2014), yet no clearly distinguishable patterns (Kragel & LaBar, 2013; McGinley & Friedman, 2017; Siegel et al., 2018). Crucially, physiological response patterns in observers of emotional expressions are, specifically when it comes to facial expressions (Wingenbach et al., 2020), highly similar to the direct experience of the observed emotional state. They %u201cresonate%u201d in the observer (Lomas et al., 2022). This correspondence is integral to the broader idea of emotional contagion, that is an automatic alignment to another person%u2019s emotional state in physiology, behaviour and experience (E. Hatfield et al., 1993; Prochazkova & Kret, 2017). From the functional perspective, the internal simulation of an observed state leads to a better understanding of the other, makes them more predictable and likely results in smoother interactions (Arnold & Winkielman, 2020; Niedenthal, 2007; Preston & de Waal, 2002; Wood et al., 2016). In turn, a reduced simulation of others%u2019 emotions or altered physiological feedback interferes with this function, and might contribute to difficulties in social interactions, and social functioning more broadly, in autism and social anxiety (Alkire et al., 2021).