Anxiety levels predict systemising-empathising tendencies and social competence

![CDATA[The Systemiser-Empathiser (S-E) theory of autism proposes two divergent strategies that underpin behaviour. ‘Systemising’ involves the observation of environmental contingencies, and the consequent formulation of concrete rules to predict events. ‘Empathising’ is the drive to attribute affective states to others, and to guide responses based on these inferences. The first aim of this study was to demonstrate that divergent trait anxiety levels could explain individual differences in the use of S-E strategies. Because those with autism demonstrate low empathy and impairments in emotion recognition, we were also interested in the degree to which emotion recognition could be explained by patterns of attention to the face. 22 university students completed a series of questionnaires, and an emotion recognition task during which their eye movements were recorded. The sample was then split into ‘Low Anxiety’ and ‘High Anxiety’ groups to identify any effects on S-E and other measures of social competence. As anticipated, individuals with higher levels of trait anxiety demonstrated a bias towards systemising strategies, whilst their less anxious peers utilised empathic strategies. Mediation analysis suggested that trait anxiety underpinned the divergent use of S-E strategies. Number of fixations to salient regions of the face was correlated with emotion recognition accuracy.]]