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Chapter 256As highlighted earlier, the link between social anxiety trait levels and attentional biases to social threat seems to depend on additional individual characteristics, such as autistic traits. This indicates that the extent to which different individuals with SAD shift their attention to external evaluative cues in social situations might also vary. Socially anxious individuals who automatically shift their attention to expressions of others might indeed benefit from trainings which aim at modifying this automatic shift to prevent the perception of social threat. In socially anxious individuals who do not show disproportionate attentional biases toward external cues, other factors might contribute more strongly to the maintenance of the disorder. While this still has to be investigated further, our results generally favour a more individualized approach, which targets specific maintenance factors in the treatment of SAD (for suggestions, see Hofmann, 2007). Since we did not find evidence for a reduced attentional bias toward emotional expressions with higher autistic trait levels, difficulties in identifying others%u2019 emotions might likely not arise from altered allocation of early visual attention (300 ms in our study) toward those. Other factors might play a more important role, such as altered physiological arousal in the presence of emotional expressions, which could also explain the earlier-mentioned effects on reaction times in our study. Future studies should specifically explore these factors, as well as their link to real-life social outcomes, to inform clinical practice.Finally, ways of capturing attentional biases more validly have recently been suggested, such as investigating trial-level attentional biases (Zvielli et al., 2015) or using response-based measures (Evans & Britton, 2018). The use of eye-tracking as an alternative technique in examining attention towards emotional versus neutral stimuli has further been encouraged to unveil individual differences in attentional processes at different stages of information processing (Clauss et al., 2022).ConclusionWith the current study, we aimed to unveil specific links between variations in the attentional bias to emotional facial expressions and social anxiety and autistic trait levels. While an attentional bias towards all emotional facial expressions, namely angry, happy, sad and fearful, was found in our study, there was only weak evidence for systematic links between these biases and clinical traits. More specifically, our exploratory analyses suggested that only the attentional bias to happy facial expressions was decreased with higher autistic trait levels. We did, however,