Page 55 - Demo

Attentional Biases to Facial Emotions532have been reported to neither consistently nor robustly result in a modification of the attentional bias toward threat (van Bockstaele & B%u00f6gels, 2014). Further, one study which found a small reduction in the bias in the visual dot-probe after ABM training, also showed that this bias is not generalizable to other tasks measuring attention to threat (van Bockstaele et al., 2017). Acknowledging the specificity of this effect, the dot-probe paradigm might not be the ideal candidate on which to directly base clinical interventions. Instead, it can be regarded as a useful additional descriptor in the complex relationship between social anxiety and the attention to emotional facial expressions. Autistic Traits and the Attentional Bias to EmotionWe expected to observe a weaker attentional bias to all emotion facial expressions, apart from anger, with higher autistic trait levels due to a decreased processing of emotional information from the faces. In contrast to our expectations, there was only an indication of this effect for happy facial expressions in our exploratory analysis. Past research in autistic children (Garc%u00eda-Blanco et al., 2017; May et al., 2015) as well as autistic adults (Monk et al., 2010) has found no evidence for alterations of the attentional bias to happy facial expressions. Next to the essential difference of examining a clinical population, these studies also used longer presentation times (i.e., 500 ms and/or 1500 ms) which could have allowed for a more elaborate (and less automatic) processing of the stimuli. As an alternative to arousal-related explanations (e.g., Cuve et al., 2018; Zalla & Sperduti, 2013), alterations in face processing in autistic individuals were suggested to result from %u201cdeficits%u201d in processing social rewards, such as faces (G. Dawson et al., 2005). Studies displaying happy facial expressions directed towards the participant, as used in our study, indeed suggest that those faces are associated with lower reward values in autistic individuals compared to neurotypical individuals (Dubey et al., 2015). A recent meta-analysis, however, has challenged the idea of altered social reward processing in ASD by unveiling less reward processing for both social and non-social stimuli (Bottini, 2018). In our study, we did not investigate mechanisms which could underlie a weaker attentional bias toward happy facial expressions with higher autistic trait levels. To get a better understanding of altered face perception in ASD, future studies should not only examine whether a weaker attentional bias towards happy facial expressions is present in autistic individuals, but also what the underlying mechanism of this alteration might be.