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Chapter 494high autistic traits, showed a recognition advantage for sad faces. Fear, in contrast, could be better recognized in point-light-displays by individuals with low autistic traits, and in faces by individuals with high autistic traits (Actis-Grosso et al., 2015). These findings suggest that, depending on clinical trait levels, different features might be used to identify others%u2019 emotional states. Recently, it has even been suggested more broadly that emotions reach awareness via different pathways in individuals on the autism spectrum compared to neurotypical individuals (Arnaud, 2020). Differences in processing facial emotional expressions, despite unimpaired emotion matching performance, have already been reported in autistic children on a neural level (Corbett et al., 2009). In our study with healthy participants, we aimed to explore whether the link between emotion recognition and two processes that have been suggested to promote emotion recognition, namely facial mimicry and metacognitive judgments, differs depending on social anxiety and autistic traits.Altered Mimicry in Emotion Recognition in SAD and ASDStudies investigating the effects of social anxiety (disorder) on facial mimicry have reported inconsistent results: while some studies found intact mimicry in nonclinical but high socially anxious individuals(Dijk, van Emmerik, et al., 2018; PeterRuf et al., 2017), others demonstrated enhanced mimicry of negative expressions and diminished mimicry of positive ones (Dimberg, 1997; Vrana & Gross, 2004)or stronger differential muscle activity between happy and angry expressions, for both the zygomaticus and the corrugator (Dimberg & Thunberg, 2007). The literature on ASD gives a clearer picture: Reduced automatic mimicry in individuals on the autism spectrum has been reported in many studies (Davies et al., 2016; D. A. Trevisan et al., 2018). Importantly, this reduction could not be explained by a generally lower facial expressiveness or an inability to mimic expressions, but by a mismatch between observed and produced facial muscle activity patterns(McIntosh et al., 2006; Rozga et al., 2013; Weiss et al., 2019). Only few studies have described differences in facial mimicry alterations between different emotion categories, and findings are inconsistent. Namely, mimicry of angry, but not happy, facial expressions was reduced with higher autistic trait levels in females in one study (Hermans et al., 2009), while reduced mimicry of happy, but not sad, expressions has been related to higher autistic traits in another study (Tan et al., 2020). Whether observed reductions in facial mimicry in high autistic trait levels