City Research Online

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by certain difficulties in emotion‐related processing. Recent research using electroencephalography (EEG) to measure somatosensory evoked potentials during emotion perception has shown reduced embodiment of emotional expressions in autistic compared to neurotypical individuals, independently from differences in visual processing. However, the underlying neural dynamics are not clear. In this study, we use Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM) on EEG data to investigate whether reduced embodiment during emotion processing in ASD individuals is caused by changes in intrinsic connectivity within the somatosensory cortex, or by top‐down modulatory effects from higher‐order frontal areas. We constructed a model involving the primary and secondary right somatosensory cortex, the right supplementary motor area and the right inferior frontal gyrus, and tested effective connectivity during emotion or gender discrimination tasks in two groups of ASD and typically developing (TD) participants (
n
 = 38, male and female, 2 females). Our results reveal that task‐related differences in electrocortical activity between the emotion and gender tasks are causally explained by changes in intrinsic activity within the right primary somatosensory cortex (rS1) in both TD and ASD. Importantly, these intrinsic changes in rS1 are significantly different between TD and ASD groups and individual task‐related changes in rS1 significantly correlate with alexithymia traits. Our study provides novel evidence on the neural dynamics underlying difficulties in emotion processing in ASD individuals, highlighting that differential intrinsic activations of the rS1 are causally involved in such difficulties, and suggests that they are mediated by alexithymia.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2026 The Author(s). Autism Research published by International Society for Autism Research and Wiley Periodicals LLC. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Publisher Keywords:	autism spectrum disorder, dynamic causal modeling, EEG, embodiment, emotion, somatosensory
Subjects:	R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Departments:	School of Health & Medical Sciences School of Health & Medical Sciences > Department of Psychology & Neuroscience
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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