Computer-based intervention for inferring facial expressions from the socio-emotional context in two children with autism spectrum disorders

Difficulties in understanding others' emotions have been widely reported in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Many methodologies for evaluating the emotion recognition can be analyzed by matching-to-sample (MTS) procedures. When using movies of socio-emotional situations as sample stimuli, children with ASD have been found to have difficulties in understanding them. Furthermore, there are few intervention studies that have targeted understanding of socio-emotional situations in children with ASD. The present study examined whether two young children with ASD can acquire the relationships between movies of socio-emotional situations and pictures of facial expressions through computer-based MTS training. The movies of situations and pictures of facial expressions represented happy, surprised, angry and sad emotions. The child with ASD was required to select the picture of facial expression when presented with the movie of socio-emotional situations as a sample stimulus, and if so, whether these skills can be generalized to untrained stimuli. We used a multiple baseline design across participants, and the results demonstrated that both children learned the relationships and improved their performance with untrained stimuli. These findings are discussed in terms of procedures to increase the understanding of others' emotions at an early developmental stage.