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                                    Chapter 128Chapter 2 explores differences in attentional tendencies towards facial emotional expression that are associated with higher autism and social anxiety trait levels in a large, heterogenous sample, using a so-called dot-probe paradigm. By tracing systematic differences in responding to briefly presented facial emotional expressions, the goal of this chapter is to capture automatic and fast alterations in reactions to others%u2019 emotions, that are not heavily influenced by elaborate processing. Furthermore, going beyond previous research, I include a variety of distinct facial emotional expressions, which allows to differentiate between emotion-general and emotion-specific attentional tendencies. In Chapter 3, I examine bodily responses to others%u2019 emotional expressions in observers as well as their interpretations, covering different levels of description in facial emotion perception. Since a comprehensive overview of the bodily resonance of diverse emotional expressions in non-clinical samples has been lacking in the literature, my aim was to gain a better understanding of this phenomenon, without considering the two conditions, as a first step. My examination includes (1) distinct facial emotional cues (tears, blushing and dilated pupils) and emotional expressions (anger, happiness, sadness, fear), the latter expressed via different modalities (face versus body), (2) different physiological measures (facial muscle activity, skin conductance and cheek temperature), as well as (3) different interpretation indices (emotion recognition, perceived intensity of others%u2019 emotions and confidence in own judgement).In line with the broader literature, the resonance of facial emotional expressions shows to be most robust and distinguishable between different emotions in facial muscle (de-) activations in Chapter 3. It, therefore, seems most promising to focus on alterations in facial mimicry, as well as in its link to subjective facial emotion perception, in autism and social anxiety. In Chapter 4, I take a first step toward this goal by examining individual differences related to autistic and social anxiety trait levels in a student population, as indication of potential alterations in the two conditions. Processing of social information can be influenced by beliefs about one%u2019s abilities, as specifically highlighted in theories on social anxiety. This has, however, only rarely been examined in an emotion recognition context, and even less so in relation to the two conditions. Hence, I additionally investigate systematic variations related to autistic and social anxiety trait levels in how confidence in emotion recognition is linked to actual recognition performance. In contrast to 
                                
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