Teaching emotion recognition to children with autism: effects of two computer displayed interventions

This study was conducted to determine if a computer-based intervention would be effective for increasing the emotion recognition ability of twin adolescents with autism and severe communication deficits. In the first experiment, the participants viewed The Transporters, with and without prompting, and they did not demonstrate increased emotion recognition ability. In the second experiment, the intervention included the Applied Behaviour Analysis teaching technique, general case analysis. Prompting and reinforcement was used to teach the twin participants multiple examples of emotional expressions demonstrated by videotaped actors. Examples of facial actions were also taught in an attempt to enhance the participants’ discrimination ability. In the second experiment, the scores for one of the participants increased for recognition of happy, sad, and surprised, and he demonstrated generalization ability. The second participant mastered one emotional expression, surprised, and he was able to generalize to a novel set of stimuli.