Using social stories to increase emotion recognition and labeling in school-age children with autism

The problem. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the usefulness of a social story intervention to increase emotion recognition and labeling skills in children with autism between the ages of 6 and 13 years.; Method. A counterbalance design with a control treatment and a real treatment was used to detect whether the observed effect was actually due to the treatment. All participants were given a pretest and then randomly assigned to either the social story intervention or the control story intervention. After the third trial the participants who originally received the control story were introduced to the social story and were given the computer tasks. A mixed analysis of variance was used to statistically analyze the results.; Results. Social stories successfully increased facial emotion learning, compared to control stories. The children with autism in both groups were able to significantly increase their scores on the three presented computer tasks. With few exceptions, these findings are largely consistent with the hypothesis that children with autism can learn to recognize the emotions happy, sad, angry, and scared through social story treatment. The social story intervention was effective in increasing emotion recognition and labeling for children with autism.