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Attentional Biases to Facial Emotions332Living in a world rich in (visual) stimulation, the human perceptual system requires guidance to filter the environment for crucial information. Emotional stimuli have been shown to strongly capture and hold attention in various modalities and impact subsequent behaviour (Carreti%u00e9, 2014). Already in the first years of life, infants use their caregivers%u2019 emotional expressions to evaluate the current situation, which is commonly referred to as social referencing (e.g., M%u00f6ller et al., 2014). Further, also in some non-human primates, emotional expressions of conspecifics have been found to receive prioritized attention, resulting in faster responding (e.g., Kret et al., 2016; van Berlo et al., 2020). Thus, the phenomenon of attention being automatically directed to emotional expressions of others seems to be a deeply-rooted, adaptive mechanism in social animals.Experimental paradigms have confirmed attentional biases toward various emotional facial expressions and body postures in healthy individuals (Bradley et al., 1997; Carlson & Mujica-Parodi, 2015; Valk et al., 2015; Wirth & Wentura, 2020).In individuals with a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) or Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD), alterations in attention to emotional information have been suggested as one potential mechanism underlying social interaction difficulties (Bantin et al., 2016a; Kliemann et al., 2010). However, research on altered attentional biases in these clinical conditions has mainly focused on social threat perception (i.e., displays of anger), whereas humans are exposed to a broad range of emotional displays in daily life. Moreover, different mechanisms have been proposed to underlie altered attention to emotion in the two clinical conditions. With the current study, we therefore aimed to take a step towards the identification of potential systematic alterations in the attention to emotional expressions in ASD and SAD by examining the link between variations in trait levels associated with the two conditions and attentional biases toward different emotional expressions. Attention to Emotional Facial Expressions and the Dot-probe Paradigm In the non-verbal communication of affect, facial expressions are particularly salient and have been shown to effectively capture attention. Most studies so far have focussed on biases to negative stimuli and have identified an %u201canger superiority effect%u201d (Hansen & Hansen, 1988). This effect describes the rapid and preferential detection of angry faces among others, highlighting the importance of threatening information. Yet, recent studies have shown that also positive stimuli, including smiling faces, attract attention compared to neutral stimuli