The Effectiveness of Interventions in Teaching Emotion Recognition to Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Emotion recognition has been identified as critical in the development of social communication and interaction in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The literature review investigated interventions incorporating technology to target emotion recognition. The search yielded 10 pertinent studies conducted from 2010 to 2016, which examined the efficacy of discrete trial training and videos, FaceSay, Mind Reading, The Transporters, and MiX. The limited number of studies which addressed emotion recognition provides promising results. However, the studies contain methodological limitations and implications for future research, which include controlling confounding variables, including individuals with low functioning ASD, identifying participant prerequisite skills, determining treatment frequency and duration boundaries, and enhancing generalization and maintenance of emotion recognition skills.