Page 95 - Demo

Facial Mimicry and Metacognition in Facial Emotion Recognition934global metacognitive beliefs seem to be biased, confidence in one%u2019s emotion recognition skills (i.e., a metacognitive judgment) can act as a reliable feedback mechanism in an emotion recognition context.Emotion Recognition Alterations in SAD and ASDWhile emotion recognition difficulties have sporadically been reported in SAD (Montagne et al., 2006), most research did not find lower accuracies (Bui et al., 2017) or even found a higher sensitivity, reflected by an emotion detection at lower expression intensities, to emotional expressions (Arrais et al., 2010; Joormann & Gotlib, 2006). Heightened attention to social cues also stands at the basis of established theoretical models of SAD (Clark & Wells, 1995; Rapee & Heimberg, 1997) and has predominantly received support in form of a %u201cnegativity bias%u201d (Amin et al., 1998; Hirsch & Clark, 2004; Machado-de-Sousa et al., 2010). In other words, negative expressions automatically attract more attention and are avoided at the same time, they are integrated more strongly in judging the self in social interactions, they are remembered better, and even ambiguous expressions are more likely to be judged negatively. Correspondingly, not clinically diagnosed individuals with high social anxiety trait levels have shown an emotion recognition advantage (Hunter et al., 2009), and specifically better recognition of negative expressions (Guti%u00e9rrez-Garc%u00eda & Calvo, 2017b; Richards et al., 2002). For individuals on the autism spectrum, in contrast, difficulties in visual emotion recognition paradigms in which emotional facial or bodily expressions had to be matched to samples or labelled have mainly been described for all basic emotions, and, particularly, for fear (Frank et al., 2018; Sucksmith et al., 2013; Uljarevic & Hamilton, 2013) (however, see (Mazzoni et al., 2022)). Thus, quite specific particularities in facial emotion recognition have been associated with SAD and ASD. Factors that could be linked to, and potentially even contribute to, the occurrence of those particularities are, however, not well described yet.In past research, individual differences in autistic traits and social anxiety traits have also been related to the usage of different strategies to recognize emotional expressions. When labelling full-body emotional expressions, high compared to low socially anxious individuals have been shown to attend to faces less, and more to expressive hands, thus using different visual cues (Kret et al., 2017). In a study comparing recognition of sadness in static facial expressions versus point light displays, only individuals with low autistic traits, compared to individuals with