An Intervention Research Of Interactive Digital Storytelling On The Positive Empathy In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

As a bridge for the development of social relations,empathy is the key to the establishment and maintenance of individual interpersonal relations.Among them,positive empathy is more closely related to pro-social social behavior,which is of great significance for promoting individuals to establish social relations and integrate into society.However,structural abnormalities in the brain and difficulties in processing emotional information,leads to children with autism spectrum disorder(ASD)are deficient in positive empathy and significantly lag behind normal children of the same age.As a result,children with autism spectrum disorders have difficulty in establishing social relationships and adapting to social situations.Previous studies have used multiple exemplar training and theory of mind training to intervene the positive empathy of children with autism spectrum disorders,but there are problems such as low ecological validity and the number of intervention studies is small,and the evidence is insufficient.Therefore,it is necessary to carry out intervention research on positive empathy of children with autism spectrum disorder in order to explore effective intervention methods.With the help of visual media,interactive digital storytelling encourage readers to participate in the storytelling process by an engaging and interactive way.It is not only interesting,but also conducive to the empathy of readers and characters in the story.It has certain targeted effects on the intervention of positive empathy of children with autism spectrum disorders.The visual presentation method is consistent with the information processing characteristics of children with ASD,the dynamic way of presenting characters’ emotions is closer to the real life situation,and the form of interactive telling is convenient for children with ASD to understand and empathize the emotions of the characters in the story.Therefore,this study explores the effect of interactive digital storytelling on positive empathy in children with autism spectrum disorder.The study adopted a multi-baseline cross-subject design in a single-subject experiment,with interactive digital storytelling as the independent variable and positive empathy of children with autism spectrum disorder as the dependent variable.The intervention was divided into three stages: baseline,intervention and maintenance.Among them,the ability of positive empathy was examined from two aspects:understanding of situation-based emotions and empathic response.The intervention period was divided into three phases: happy,grateful and complimentary.At the end of the experiment,the visual analysis showed that the positive empathy and each dimension of the three subjects showed a significant upward trend,and the maintenance data were also good.By calculating the effect size of Tau and MBLR,the average intervention effect of Tau and the average maintenance effect of positive empathy were 0.96 and 1 respectively.The mean change rate of MBLR during intervention period was 80%,and the mean change rate of MBLR during maintenance period was 83%.The results showed that the effect of intervention was good,the immediate effect and the maintenance effect were good.At last,the main conclusions of the study are as follows:First,interactive digital storytelling can effectively improve the positive empathy of children with autism spectrum disorders,and the immediate and maintenance effects are relatively positive.Second,intervention effects of interactive digital storytelling on the positive empathy of children with autism spectrum disorders were different,and the effect of empathic response is better than that understanding of situation-based emotions.According to the research results and the problems existing in the research,it is proposed that in the future education and research of empathy ability,children with autism should be enriched with positive emotional experience,empathy training should be carried out based on natural social situations,and interactive digital storytelling design should be carried out based on the reader’s sense of substitution.