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Chapter 496Objectives of the Current StudyIn the current study, we examined whether social anxiety and autistic traits modulate the links between facial mimicry and emotion recognition as well as between confidence judgments in own emotion recognition skills and emotion recognition. To investigate this, our participants first passively viewed naturalistic video clips of different facial expressions of emotion while we measured their facial muscle activity. In a subsequent task, participants indicated how strongly they associated the expressions with distinct emotion categories and were asked how confident they were in their judgments. Despite sharing social interaction difficulties in the global disorder definitions, previous research on emotion recognition, facial mimicry, and metacognitive judgments showed specific alterations associated with SAD and ASD. Therefore, we also expected to find distinct modulations for the two trait dimensions. More specifically, confirming the suggested heightened sensitivity to social cues, higher levels of social anxiety were expected to be related to a recognition advantage of facial expressions, resulting in higher accuracy rates. According to the negativity bias findings, this advantage should be specifically pronounced for negative expressions (i.e., anger, fear, and sadness). As individuals with SAD have been found to report a generalized underconfidence in their social skills, we expected that, despite an improved emotion recognition performance, elevated social anxiety traits would be related to reduced overall confidence in the performance. Moreover, based on observations that confidence judgments were predictive of emotion recognition accuracy in healthy subjects, we would like to explore whether the scaling of confidence judgments to actual emotion recognition performance is altered depending on social anxiety traits. In line with a proposed facilitating role of facial mimicry in emotion recognition, stronger facial mimicry might be assumed with higher social anxiety traits. Empirical evidence for both relationships, social anxiety (disorder) and facial mimicry as well as facial mimicry and emotion recognition, is, however, inconclusive. Therefore, we aimed to directly test whether the role of facial mimicry in emotion recognition is altered depending on an individual%u2019s social anxiety traits.Regarding autistic traits, we expected to observe an overall worse recognition of naturalistic dynamic facial expressions in association with higher levels of autistic traits, which should be most pronounced for fearful faces. Higher autistic trait