Teaching Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder to Recognize and Express Emotion: A Review of the Literature

Abstract

The developmental literature has focused extensively on deficits in the expression and recognition of emotion in people with autism, and has reported on the use of interactive tools to address the problems of affect. The behavioral literature has offered interventions to teach children with autism to engage in appropriate affective displays, and for these gains to generalize more readily to novel conditions. Nevertheless, the topic of affect intervention remains under-researched. Although a handful of affect-training behavioral studies have been published in the last two decades, more research is needed to determine precisely what would constitute science-based best-practice methods to facilitate socialization in autism. This review examines the developmental and behavioral approaches in the study of affect in autism; it reviews behavior analytic interventions that have been carried out in this context and evaluates reasons and potential solutions for the underrepresentation of this topic. Finally, this review offers recommendations for social-skills training that could be adopted by educators and practitioners.

Keywords

• Affective behavior
• Applied behavior analysis
• Autism
• Emotion
• Facial expression
• Vocal intonation