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Chapter 236faces and, specifically the eye and mouth region, less (Chita-Tegmark, 2016), which might contribute to difficulties in identifying emotions (Kliemann et al., 2010). It has been long assumed that the active avoidance of the eye region, conveying emotional information, would be driven by an unpleasant hyperactivation of the amygdala in autistic individuals (relevance detection theory; Zalla & Sperduti, 2013). Recently, however, avoidance of the eye region was claimed to be the result of preventing both hypo- and hyperarousal (two pathway model; Cuve et al., 2018). Attention to facial emotional expressions thus seems to be related to unpleasant arousal levels in autistic individuals. Yet, biased attention towards threatening faces specifically was observed in autistic children and adults (Fan et al., 2020). This led to the claim that the %u201canger superiority effect%u201d (Hansen & Hansen, 1988) as basic adaptive phenomenon would be unaltered in autistic individuals (Gaigg, 2012). As an alternative explanation, given the high comorbidity between social anxiety and autism (Spain et al., 2018), the question was raised whether the threat bias observed in autistic individuals could be attributed to comorbid social anxiety. Specifically in the social domain, autistic and socially anxious individuals show similar patterns, such as choosing to be alone and avoiding or disliking social situations (White et al., 2012). Apart from one exception (Hollocks et al., 2016), experimental studies, however, have found no evidence for an influence of anxiety symptoms on the threat bias in ASD using the dot-probe task (Hollocks et al., 2013; May et al., 2015). Importantly, as most of the available dot-probe studies examine alterations in ASD, these studies were performed with a developmental sample (children/teenagers), thus limiting the generalizability of the results. Similarly, alterations in biases to emotional expressions other than anger have mostly been investigated in autistic children. Here, one study found no evidence of a bias to happy (nor angry) facial expressions (May et al., 2015), whereas another study found no biases toward happy or sad expressions (Garc%u00eda-Blanco et al., 2017) in both neurotypical and autistic children. The inconclusive evidence from developmental samples is also reflected in the scarce adult literature on this topic: In one study, only adults with low but not with high autistic trait levels, showed an attentional bias to fearful expressions (Miu et al., 2012). In another study, in contrast, no differences in attentional biases between autistic and non-autistic adults were found. Both groups showed attentional biases to happy and angry faces, but not to sad faces (Monk et al., 2010). Examining all existing evidence together, it is not clear whether attentional biases to specific emotional expressions exist in