A teaching procedure to help children with autistic spectrum disorder to label emotions

• This study explored a procedure to teach children with ASD to label emotions of others.
• Children were taught the match vocabulary for a set of emotions and to novel situation cards.
• Participants were then taught to match emotions to illustrations of situations which reflected each emotion.
• Participants were able to generalize the labels for emotions to novel situations and new pictures of emotions.

This study explored a teaching procedure designed to enable children with autistic spectrum disorder Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to label (tact) the emotions of others. Ten children, aged between 6.1 and 9.6 years, were taught the relevant vocabulary to label a set of emotions (e.g., happy, sad, angry), to match these tacts to illustrated situations, to generalize these tacts to novel situations, and to tact their own emotions. At baseline, participants showed no ability to match emotion cards to situations in which those emotions would occur. Participants were taught to tact these emotions by first matching-to-sample the facial expressions of happy, sad and angry to illustrations of situations which reflected each emotion. This was followed by a tacting phase, during which participants were taught to match emotion cards to particular situation cards. In the first of two generalization probes, participants were able to tact happy, sad, or angry when shown untrained situation cards (probe 1), and could choose those things that made them happy, sad or angry from an additional set of untrained illustrations (probe 2), showing an improved understanding of their own emotions and those of other, than was found during baseline.