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

Abstract

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.

Why do we mimic? A predictive account for automatic mimicry

“…Crucially, we are not suggesting that mimicry alone predicts others' behavior but that mimicry -by mitigating the prediction error -enhances inter-individual emotional bridges 97 allowing us to make more efficient predictions about them. In line with this, several studies have shown that mimicry, by giving access to multi-dimensional proprioceptive cues, accelerates emotion recognition 5,98 , especially in the case of ambiguous facial expressions 99 (but see 100 ). Particularly facial mimicry has been shown to speed up the recognition of emotions in others by engaging the embodied simulation processes involved in understanding those emotional expressions 5 .…”

Predictive Effect of Social Cognitive Skills on Social Anxiety

“…Considering the gender ratios of the individuals participating in the study, it is noteworthy that the ratio of women is higher than that of men. When the literature is examined, it is seen that the participation rate of women is higher in most of the social anxiety studies (Chu et al 2022, Folz et al 2022, Lyvers et al 2022). Although it is known that there is no gender difference in adulthood due to the nature of social anxiety (APA 2013), the high rate of women in this study can be explained by the fact that women are more willing to participate in scientific studies.…”

You better listen to yourself: studying metacognitive efficiency in emotion recognition by voice

“…Accurate perception of others' feeling and thinking is a key skill associated with achieving successful interpersonal relationships (Mitsea et al, 2022). In the visual channel, for example, authors revealed that higher CR was associated with higher accuracy in the facial emotional recognition task, underscoring the fundamental role of CR in the adjustments of social behavior (Bègue et al, 2019;Garcia-Cordero et al, 2021;Folz et al, 2022;Katyal and Fleming, 2024), whereas metacognitive dysfunction has been implicated as a key source of maladaptive behavior regarding emotional perception (Arslanova et al, 2023).…”