Computer-Mediated Intervention to Enhance Emotional Competence in Children With Autism in Schools
Overview
- Phase
- N/A
- Intervention
- Not specified
- Conditions
- Autism Spectrum Disorder
- Sponsor
- Bar-Ilan University, Israel
- Enrollment
- 130
- Locations
- 1
- Primary Endpoint
- Emotion recognition task
- Status
- Active, Not Recruiting
- Last Updated
- 2 years ago
Overview
Brief Summary
Autism spectrum condition (ASC) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized fundamentally by social deficits. Emotional competence - the ability to express, recognize, understand, and regulate emotions - is a key aspect of social communication. Evidence suggests that the developmental trajectories of autistic children differ from that of neuro-typical children regarding their ability to process and recognize emotions from paralinguistic emotional facial, body language, and voice tone cues. They also have difficulty integrating these cues in context and lack in emotional language.
Numerous approaches to teaching people with autism how to recognize and understand emotions have been tried, with recent increased interest in computer-based interventions (CBI). However, most of the research focused only on facial expressions, were limited to autistic children with no intellectual disabilities (ID); and showed limited generalization to real social settings. EmotiPlay, a computer-based intervention program, designed to enhance emotion recognition (ER) by addressing multiple modalities of emotional cues (facial expressions, tone of voice, body language), has shown good outcome when used at home by autistic children and no ID . However, the examination of generalization was partial and depended only on parental reports.
The present study main goals are to: (1) Examine the adaptation and the integration of EmotiPlay into special education classrooms in regular schools. (2) Assess EmotiPlay's effect on emotional competence among autistic children at different functioning levels.
Detailed Description
This research is comprised of two main stages: the first stage is a Pilot, who's main goals are to examine the adaptation and integration of EmotiPlay's intervention to a school setting with autistic children at various ages and levels of functioning, and to test an extended EC battery for EmotiPlay's evaluation. The pilot includes 5 special education classes that will take part at a short version of the intervention program, and a control group of neurotypical children matched in intellectual and linguistic abilities. the second stage will include 150 participants, divided into three groups: 60 7-10-year-old autistic children who will participate in the intervention program; 60 7-10-year-old autistic children who will not participate in the intervention; and 30 neuro-typical children matched in cognitive and linguistic skills. All participant will undergo a pre-assessment tests that include: (1) multi-modal basic and complex ER (2) emotion understanding based on a standardized measure (the Test of Emotion Comprehension - TEC) (3) an emotion definition task (4) a story- telling task (5) an observation of children's prosocial behavior during free-playtime (using the Playground Observation of Peer Engagement - POPE). After evaluations participants will be randomly divided into two groups, the first group will take part in the intervention program and the second will be the control group. EmotiPlay's intervention program will be administered by a certified educational staff for 18 weeks (36 lessons). All participant will be evaluated immediately after the intervention; and 15 weeks post-intervention. The important contribution of this study is twofold. It integrates an intervention program to promote emotional competence into the educational system, which serves as a major platform for acquiring social skills. Concurrently, it offers a way to assess the social functioning in real life situations of children with autism at different levels of functioning.
Investigators
Ofer Golan
Prof. Ofer Golan
Bar-Ilan University, Israel
Eligibility Criteria
Inclusion Criteria
- •autism spectrum condition
Exclusion Criteria
- •Verbal Intelligence (according to Wechsler) 3 or lower.
Outcomes
Primary Outcomes
Emotion recognition task
Time Frame: before intervention
Emotion recognition test includes 4 tasks to examine emotion recognition: 1. facial expressions videos 2. decontextualized vocal utterances 3. body language videos 4. Integrative video clips presenting all 3 modalities in context, that were extracted from old television shows, sound track was muffled in order to prevent semantic information, but keep prosodic cues. The test include 12 emotions, for every video or recording 4 answers are presented, the target emotion and the order of the possible answers was counterbalanced. In each modality the subject can achieve 0-12 points, a point for every emotion recognized correctly.
Emotional-mental vocabulary
Time Frame: 15 weeks after the end of the intervention
Emotion definition task - assess the subject's ability to define 12 emotions. Participants were asked to define the emotion (for example: "please explain what is happy?") and to give examples to personalize experience related to each of the emotions (e.g.: "can you describe a situation that you felt happy?"). The definition and examples were audiotaped, and then transcribed. Points will be allocated to the definition of each emotion according the subscale vocabulary in WISC- IV, all emotions falls within the range of 0 to 24 points
social functioning
Time Frame: 15 weeks after the end of the intervention
socio-emotional functioning will be evaluated by playground observation and coded by POPE - Playground Observation of Peer Engagement (Kasari et al, 2005). This instrument is a time-interval behavior coding system. Independent observers from the research team watched the target child on the playground for 40 consecutive seconds and then coded for 2 seconds for ten minutes during school recess. The observers noted the child's engagement with peers on the playground (solitary, proximity, onlooking, parallel, parallel aware, involved in games and rules and joint engaged with peers) in each interval. Coders will also note positive and negative initiations of the target child towered other children, and positive and negative responses to a peer's social overtures.
Emotion recognition
Time Frame: 15 weeks after the end of the intervention
Emotion recognition test includes 4 tasks to examine emotion recognition: 1. facial expressions videos 2. decontextualized vocal utterances 3. body language videos 4. Integrative video clips presenting all 3 modalities in context, that were extracted from old television shows, sound track was muffled in order to prevent semantic information, but keep prosodic cues. The test include 12 emotions, for every video or recording 4 answers are presented, the target emotion and the order of the possible answers was counterbalanced. In each modality the subject can achieve 0-12 points, a point for every emotion recognized correctly.
Emotion understanding
Time Frame: 15 weeks after the end of the intervention
TEC - Test of Emotion Competence (Pons \& Harris, 2000) design to assess emotion understanding in 3-12 years old children, it is based on Pons et al. (2002) model of 9 developmental stages to emotion understanding among children. In the test, the subjects are presented with 23 illustrated pictures, in a boy and girl versions. In the first 5 scenarios the child is asked to recognize basic emotions from facial expressions, Next, the child is presented with short stories and the illustrated picture is missing emotional cues in the character face. The examiner reads the story and the child is asked to choose the correct emotion from 4 options. Maximum scoring 21 points.
spontaneous emotional mental language
Time Frame: 15 weeks after the end of the intervention
Narrative re-telling task - narratives were elicited using two wordless picture-books, "Frog on His Own (Mayer, 1973) and "Frog, where are you?" (Mayer, 1969). Stories were shortened to a 15-pages, depicting a frog's adventures after departing from his boy companion. Participants are asked to listen to a story the examiner is telling with a predetermined script, while presenting the pictures on an iPad (via book creator app). One book was randomly assigned to each participant, and after listening to the story, the participants will be asked to tell the story in their own words while flipping through the pictures. The stories will be audiotaped, transcribed and coded according to Capps et al., (2000)
Secondary Outcomes
- adaptive skills(immediately after the intervention)
- Autistic traits(immediately after the intervention)