title: Brief report: teaching situation-based emotions to children with autistic spectrum disorder.
abstract: Many individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have difficulty recognizing emotions in themselves and others. Three children (all males) participated in the study. In a multi-element design children with ASD were trained to tact situation-based emotions (i.e., "happy", "sad", "angry", and "afraid") using novel video based scenarios. To increase the likelihood that each child would learn a generalized repertoire of emotion understanding, multiple exemplars of emotion identification were trained using a multi-component procedure. The results indicated significant increases in tacting situation-based emotions. To evaluate the generalization of training, novel video stories were employed that depicted the trained emotions. The findings indicated generalization of situation-based emotional tacting to the novel video stories.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea, UK. l.mchugh@swansea.ac.uk
authors.forename: Louise
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: McHugh
authors.forename: Alina
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bobarnac
authors.forename: Phil
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Reed
mesh_terms: D002659:Child Development Disorders, Pervasive / Q000523:psychology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004644:Emotions; D005793:Generalization, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D021641:Recognition, Psychology