The Effect Of "The Transporters" On Emotional Recognition In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders

As the basis of emotional communication and social interaction,emotional understanding is a good indicator of the development of individual social skills.One of the core disorders of autism spectrum disorder（ASD）is the impairment of social communication skill,so how much is the development of emotion recognition ability of this group? What are the characteristics of their gaze on emotional faces? “The transporters” emotion video,developed by British scholar Baron-Cohen and his team,is specially used to teach ASD children to understand emotions,and has been promoted in some western countries,so can“The transporters”improve the emotion recognition ability of Chinese ASD children?In Experiment 1,an emotion recognition test was set up to explore the recognition of four basic emotions and the differences between the ASD children and the Typical Developing children of the same age.Experiment 2 set up an eye-tracking test to explore the characteristics of people’s face fixation and the differences between the ASD children and TD children watching social situational videos.In the intervention study,an experimental design across participants’ progressive criteria was used to intervene in two children with ASD using “The transporters”,and the effect of“The transporters” on the recognition of four basic emotions was explored.The results of experiment 1 showed that:（1）there were defects in the emotion recognition ability of ASD children.（2）Among the four basic emotions,although the overall facial expression recognition of ASD children lags behind TD children of the same age,the recognition of happy and sad expressions is no different from that of TD children of the same age.（3）Among the four basic emotions,the overall emotional situational recognition of ASD children lags behind that of TD children of the same age,and the recognition of angry situations lags behind the other three emotions.The results of experiment 2 showed that:（1）ASD children could detect the facial region quickly,but the total time and times of facial region fixation were significantly less than those of TD children of the same age.（2）the eye and mouth fixation indexes of ASD children were significantly lower than those of TD children of the same age.（3）both ASD and TD children pay more attention to eyes than to mouth,and eyes provide more emotional clues than mouth.The intervention results showed that:（1）after the intervention of “The transporters”,the emotion recognition ability of two ASD subjects was significantly improved and generalized to a certain extent.（2）after the intervention of the “The transporters”,the two ASD subjects paid more attention to the expression area of the characters in“The transporters”.（3）“The transporters” can be used as an effective tool for emotional intervention of ASD children in China.