Resonating emotions: an embodied perspective on alterations in facial emotion processing in autism and social anxiety

Abstract

As social animals, feeling connected with others is essential for human well-being. Understanding others’ emotions plays an important role in building and maintaining these social connections. In everyday life, people often have to rely on non-verbal information, such as facial and bodily expressions, to infer others’ emotional states. These emotional expressions can resonate in the observer’s body, just like music, which can facilitate their interpretation. People on the autism spectrum and those with social anxiety differ in both how they respond to others' emotional facial expressions on a bodily level and how they interpret them. Here, differences in facial emotion perception likely contribute to broader difficulties in social interactions. Even though processes do not occur in isolation, most studies to date only examine differences in facial emotion processing at one level (e.g., physiological responses versus subjective interpretation) without exploring potential connections between these levels. Moreover, studies focus on alterations associated with either autism or social anxiety (trait levels), ruling the possibility to identify shared or distinct patterns out. The current dissertation addresses these limitations and offers a more integrative understanding of alterations in the perception, resonance and interpretation of other’s facial emotional expressions in autism and social anxiety (trait levels).