Page 26 - Demo

Chapter 124Research on spontaneous facial mimicry, that is the mirroring of observed facial expressions, has indeed shown that individuals on the autism spectrum mimic expressions of others less (Davies et al., 2016), or differently (Oberman et al., 2009; Weiss et al., 2019), than controls. Some studies also report reduced physiological arousal in response to others%u2019 emotions (Hubert et al., 2009; Keil et al., 2018; however see Dijkhuis et al., 2019; Mathersul et al., 2013). For individuals with social anxiety, results regarding spontaneous alterations in facial mimicry (e.g., Dijk et al., 2018; Vrana & Gross, 2004) as well as physiological arousal responses to emotional expressions (e.g., Dimberg & Thunberg, 2007; Tsunoda et al., 2008) are less conclusive. Here, the presence of a social context and its effects on information processing and behaviour might play a crucial role (Rapee & Heimberg, 1997). Namely, individuals with social anxiety care more about behaving socially desirable and overestimate the visibility of their actual physiological arousal in a social context (Edelmann & Baker, 2002; Nikoli%u0107 et al., 2015), which may lead them to control their expressions more strongly than control participants (Dijk, Fischer, et al., 2018) and act rigidly, thereby limiting the resonance of others%u2019 expressions in their own body. In those lines, even if others emotions%u2019 would resonate similarly in the two conditions compared to controls, this %u201cfeedback%u201d, may not necessarily be integrated to a similar degree or in a similar way. Sensation of Embodied Emotions in Autism and Social AnxietyIndividuals indeed vary widely in how strongly signals from their bodies link to the perception of their own as well as observed emotional states (Coles et al., 2019; Holland et al., 2020). Recent approaches that aim for a mechanistic understanding of individual differences in emotion processing, therefore, investigate the role of interoception (Critchley & Garfinkel, 2017), that is the sensation, integration, interpretation and regulation of internal signals (W. G. Chen et al., 2021). Corresponding to this definition, interoceptive processes can be described at different levels of processing (%u201cdimensions%u201d), such as the strength of the afferent signal, as well as for different bodily systems (%u201caxis%u201d), such as the cardiovascular system (Suksasilp & Garfinkel, 2022). Existing theoretical frameworks focus on different aspects to describe individual differences in interoceptive processing. In the dimensional approach by Garfinkel and colleagues (2016), three dissociable