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.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank children and the parents of the children who willingly participated in the current project. The some of the data reported herein were presented at the Annual International Association for Behavior Analysis, Convention in Phoenix (May, 2009).
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McHugh, L., Bobarnac, A. & Reed, P. Brief Report: Teaching Situation-Based Emotions to Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder. J Autism Dev Disord 41, 1423–1428 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-010-1152-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-010-1152-2