Theory Of Mind And Episodic Foresight In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders: An Intervention Study

Autism spectrum disorders(ASD)also known as children with pervasive developmental disorders(PDD),is a group with verbal communication disorders and restricted,repetitive,and stereotyped behaviors(Zou et al,2005).In recent years,the number of children with autism spectrum disorders is increasing.And therefore the intervention of children with autism spectrum disorders is particularly important.Children with autism have defects in theory of mind(To M).For example,they can’t understand the false belief.They are deficits in emotion,can’t identify emotions in facial expressions and can’t express their own emotion.ASD children also have defects in desire understanding.They have difficulty in understanding the wishes of others and predicting others’ behaviors.Episodic foresight(Ep F,imagine future scenarios and use such imagination to guide current action)links with theory of mind(Hanson&Atance,2013).The present study selected 14 children with ASD.Half of them were chosen randomly into the intervention group with sandplay therapy for 6 months,and others as the control group without any intervention.Sandplay included 4 phases,the familiar stage,the scene construction stage,the pretense play stage and the stage of self expression.We use Independent-samples t-tests to compare the two groups’ post-test scores in To M tasks.The two groups differe dsignificantly in terms of all To M tasks(ps<0.005).Next we use Paired-samples to t-tests separately compare the two groups’ pre-test and post-test scores in To M tasks.The experimental group also presented significantly better scores in all aspects of the post-test than the pre-test(ps<0.01),while the control group show differences only in desire understanding task(p<0.05).We use the same method to compare the two groups’ pre-test and post-test scores in all tasks of belief understanding,emotion understanding and desire understanding.It is found that the experimental group differed significantly in terms of all tasks except cartoon facial expression recognition task(ps<0.05);and the control group show differences only in affective perspective-taking task(p<0.005).In addition,it is found that the ability of foresight in experimental group has been improved after intervention.At the same time,the role of development can not be ignored.Furthermore,by randomly selecting subjects,we make a comprehensive and in-depth analysis for subjects’ intervention effects at each stage respectively.