Autism Intervention Study In Children Based On Empathy-systematic Theory

Empathizing-Systemizing (E-S) Theory assumes that autism spectrum disorder (ASD) children have empathy ability defect, but their systematic ability is superior to normal person. The thesis firstly introduced the diagnostic criteria of ASD in DSM-V and E-S Theory proposed in 2009. And then, in order to explore the cross-cultural effectiveness of "Transporters" which is an intervention material developed based on E-S Theory, the thesis applied the methods of intervention experiment combined with observation of ASD children to do the study. Methods:Selected out subjects from an inclusive class in a special kindergarten in Nanjing, matched them with age, gender, wechsler intelligence and language performance, then set up ASD intervention group, ASD control group and Typically Developing (TD) control group. All three groups were tested twice:at Time 1 and then 6 weeks after at Time 2. Children in ASD intervention group were intervened one-to-one by the same professional researcher. During intervention, the reseach had to record the observation and then select representative cases to interview their parents after the experiment. Results:(1) The EQ score, SQ score and EQ-SQ score of ASD children are lower than TD children with significant difference; there is no significant correlation between EQ score and SQ score in ASD children group while EQ score and SQ score are significantly correlated in TD children group. (2) ASD children performs prominently worse than TD children at Time 1; the ASD intervention group perform equally to TD control group and significantly better than ASD control group after intervention at Time 2. (3) The exercises error rates in the second round of intervention reduced in the first round, and children in ASD intervention group master more emotion words during the intervention. Conclusion:"Transporters" improves empathy ability and emotion recognition ability of ASD children significantly, and its cross-cultural effectiveness has been proved in China. The study provides evidences to the cross-cultural research of E-S Theory in a positive view.