Facial mimicry and metacognitive judgments in emotion recognition – modulated by social anxiety and autistic traits?

Both individuals with social anxiety disorder and individuals with autism spectrum disorder show alterations in the perception of others’ emotional facial expressions. Additionally, mimicry of an observed expression as well as the assessment of one’s own performance, i.e. metacognition, may be altered in these individuals. Using a non-clinical sample (N=57), we examined whether emotion recognition is linked to facial mimicry and confidence in one’s performance, as well as potential alterations in this link associated with social anxiety and autistic traits. While participants were presented with videos of spontaneous emotional facial expressions, we measured their facial muscle activity, and asked them to label the expressions and indicate their confidence levels in accurately labelling the expressions. Our results showed that confidence in emotion recognition was lower with higher social anxiety trait levels even though actual recognition was not related to social anxiety trait levels. Higher autistic trait levels, in contrast, were associated with worse recognition as well as a weakened link between performance and facial mimicry. Consequently, social anxiety might not affect emotion recognition itself but the top-down evaluation in an emotion recognition context, whereas individuals with autism may integrate information promoting emotion recognition, i.e. sensorimotor simulations, to a lesser degree.