Investigating embodied representations of emotional expressions in ASD: A study with SEPs

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterised by difficulties in social interaction and communication, as well as repetitive and restricted patterns of behaviour and interests (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Recent research suggests that differences in embodied representations of emotional expressions might play a role in ASD. For instance, several empirical studies show that recognition of emotional expressions [3], interoception [2] and physiological responses to social stimuli [4] function differently in ASD individuals. However, the neural mechanisms involved in atypical embodied representations of emotional expression in ASD has not been systematically investigated. Recent research highlights that visual perception of faces and bodies in typical population is accompanied by parallel activity of visual and somatosensory areas [1, 5-8]. Our EEG study provides the first direct measurement of the activity of the somatosensory cortex during perception of facial emotional expressions in ASD individuals. Our methodology combines Visual and Somatosensory Evoked Potentials (VEPs and SEPs), to isolate effects driven by somatosensory or visual processing. This methodology has already provided evidence of unique contributions of the somatosensory cortex in processing emotional expressions by Sel et al [8] and we are now interested in investigating whether ASD population show different patterns of neural response compared to typical individuals. We are analyzing responses in visual and somatosensory cortical areas in a group of ASD and a control TD participants while they perform a visual emotion recognition task and a control gender recognition task. We predict a modulation of somatosensory evoked potentials driven by emotional expressions processing but not by gender. Moreover, we expect to observe a significant difference in this effect across the two groups.