Page 56 - Demo

Chapter 254Unexpectedly, reaction times to the dot probe in trials with angry or sad facial expressions were systematically linked to autistic traits, independent of whether the probe appeared behind the emotional or the neutral expression (i.e., congruency). Higher autistic trait levels were associated with relatively faster reaction times after the presentation of an angry face and with slower reaction times after the presentation of a sad face. A potential explanation of this finding could be that the mere presence of the expressions affected the observer%u2019s arousal more strongly with higher autistic trait levels. More specifically, independent of their location, angry expressions could have elicited increases in arousal and sad expressions decreases in arousal, which would result in faster and slower reaction times, respectively. Yet, differences in reaction times between emotion categories in the general model could not be found. Further, the slopes for the links between autistic traits and reaction times in trials with angry and sad facial expressions were not significantly different from zero. Thus, the reaction times for angry and sad expressions were only different compared to the average link between reaction times to all expressions and autistic traits.Finally, we observed a significant interaction between social anxiety traits and autistic traits in predicting the attentional bias to angry faces. Individuals with higher autistic traits showed a reduced attentional bias towards angry faces, but only when social anxiety trait levels were also high. This was in contrast to our expectations. We assumed that high social anxiety levels would go along with a stronger attentional bias to angry faces in individuals with higher autistic trait levels, as angry expression might be perceived as more threatening. Looking at the predicted value plots, the reduced attentional bias seemed to be driven by faster reaction times to the probe in incongruent trials (i.e., probe replaces neutral faces) with higher autistic traits. This potentially supports the idea of a generally heightened arousal for angry expressions. Nevertheless, given the complexity of explaining this three-way interaction, the high overlap of confidence intervals and the lacking support of previous literature in clinical populations (Hollocks et al., 2013; May et al., 2015; Monk et al., 2010), future research should examine the interplay between autistic and social anxiety traits on attentional biases to emotion.