Social cognition in autism has been extensively investigated during the last thirty years. Children with autism appear generally less good than control groups in theory of mind's tasks (Yirmiya et al. 1998; Peterson, et al. 2005), and emotional understanding is regularly presented as deficient (Baron-Cohen, 1993; Celani et al., 1999; Thommen et al., 2004).
Objectives:
How to teach social cognition is a challenge for professional. Our research evaluated an occupational therapy intervention based on simulation theory in the context of typical development.
Methods:
With a puppet workshop addressed to children, we have developed progressive activities on social skills, such as decode emotional states, simulate a social game, etc.
21 children with autism aged 4- to 8-years-old, were evaluated twice (8 months interval) through the Italian version of the Test of Emotion Comprehension (Pons & Harris, 2005), the Italian version of the Tom Storybooks (Blijd-Hoogewys et al. 2003) and the APL-Medea (Lorusso, 2010). In addition, in 17 children attention to face and eyes direction as well as to expression of emotion was measured using eye-tracking. All children were evaluated with the ADOS and Leiter-R. Data collection is still in progress.
Results:
The results will examine the correlation between the tasks and analyze item by item the improvement after the intervention. We will discuss the capacity of different type of evaluation to capture the children progression (method "paper and pencil" versus "Eye Tracker").
Conclusions:
The evaluation of outcomes in behavioral therapy is a challenging task, and we will propose a discussion regarding the optimal approach and tools in this context.
See more of: Treatments: A: Social Skills; School, Teachers
See more of: Prevalence, Risk factors & Intervention