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Attentional Biases to Facial Emotions352even anticipated (Clark & Wells, 1995; Heimberg et al., 2010, 2014; Hofmann, 2007; Rapee & Heimberg, 1997). This altered attention entails an increased awareness of negatively biased cognitive self-representations and physiological arousal. The cognitive-behavioral model of anxiety in social phobia (Rapee & Heimberg, 1997; updates: Heimberg et al., 2010, 2014) additionally posits that attention is tuned to external cues in order to inform mental self-representations. Facial expressions are one example of these cues which can indicate possible negative evaluations by others, which people with SAD fear. This theoretical assumption has been confirmed in various empirical studies showing altered attention to angry facial expressions, representing social threat, in socially anxious individuals (e.g., Lazarov et al., 2021). In line with this, findings from dot-probe studies overall, yet not consistently, report an attentional bias towards threat faces (for a review, see Bantin et al., 2016). Different mechanisms have been suggested to underlie biased attention to threatening stimuli, namely (a) an initial vigilance to threat which; (b) is followed by avoidance after longer exposure (Mogg, Bradley, et al., 2004), as well as; (c) a prolonged attentional capture by threat stimuli, (i.e., difficulty in disengagement; Cisler & Koster, 2010). In the dot-probe task, the difficulty to disengage from threat with higher social anxiety was predominantly found in non-clinical samples (Salemink et al., 2007), whereas a vigilance to threat was prevalent in clinical samples (Klumpp & Amir, 2009).Importantly, even though different types of emotional expressions appear in a social context and could provide relevant (evaluative) information about other people (Heimberg et al., 2010, 2014; Rapee & Heimberg, 1997), there is only limited research on altered attentional biases toward emotional facial expressions other than anger (Mogg, Philippot, et al., 2004). In these few studies, (altered) biases, if present at all, were less pronounced compared to the anger bias. The number and breadth of these studies is, however, too limited to draw any conclusions on biased attention to emotions other than anger in social anxiety. Thus, our study aims to contribute to a better understanding of altered attention to emotional expressions associated with social anxiety by including various emotional facial expressions. Attention to Emotion in AutismAnother clinical population that has been found to show alterations in attention to emotional facial expressions are autistic individuals. They tend to attend to