A Comparison of the Efficacy of Teaching Tacting Emotional Expressions by Face-Part vs. Whole Face to Autistic Children
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Authors
Michaels, Andrea Nicole
Issue Date
2024
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
Keywords
Autism , Emotional Expressions , Generalization , Stimulus Overselectivity
Alternative Title
Abstract
As an individual within the verbal community, it is important to be able to accurately identify the emotional expressions of others. Without the ability to correctly identify these emotional expressions, some individuals may respond inappropriately in a social situation. Impairment in social communication is one of the DSM’s defining characteristics within autism spectrum disorder (ASD). According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Mental Disorders (5th ed.; DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013), autistic individuals may demonstrate difficulties in each of three areas of social communication and interaction. However, in 1971, Lovaas et al. coined the term “stimulus overselectivity,” which refers to an individual’s tendency to engage in overly selective attention to a limited portion (i.e., subset) of a complex stimulus. Emotional expressions can be characterized as a complex stimulus; the face consists of different parts (e.g., eye-region, mouth-region). Therefore, it may be beneficial to teach autistic individuals emotional expressions by face part rather than only utilizing the whole face. For the first two participants, we used a parallel treatments design (Delfs et al., 2014; Gast & Wolery, 1988) and for the second two participants, we utilized an adapted alternating treatments design (Sindelar et al., 1985) to evaluate the relative effects of two different instructional methods (i.e., teaching emotional expressions by whole face vs. part face) on the acquisition of tacting emotional expressions in young autistic children. Our data indicate that the kind of teaching paradigm utilized for generating faster skill acquisition of correctly tacting emotional expressions is idiosyncratic to each learner. Additionally, our data indicate that teaching emotional expressions by part-face stimuli may generalize better to correctly tacting untaught whole face emotional expressions compared to teaching by whole face stimuli alone.