News and Knowledge

Amount of OAR Funding

$29,999.00

Researcher

Karen Hobden, Ph.D., Research Associate and Core Program Coordinator, Developmental Disabilities Institute, Wayne State University

Timeframe

This study began in January 2011 and will be completed by December 2011. A research summary detailing the results of this study will be submitted to OAR by March 2012.

Purpose

The proposed study will examine the effectiveness of a new intervention designed to improve emotion recognition skills in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). “The Transporters” is an animated children’s series developed in the United Kingdom that features vehicles with the actors’ faces. The series, which is available on DVD, consists of 15 five-minute episodes each featuring a different emotion or mental state. The proposed research will examine the effectiveness of using “The Transporters” as a tool to improve emotion recognition skills.

Why Is This Study Needed?

Individuals with ASD display impairments in recognizing emotions in facial expressions, vocal intimations, and body language. These deficits in emotion recognition may contribute to the difficulty experienced by children and adults with ASD in forming and maintaining peer relationships, placing this population at risk for social isolation, victimization, depression, and underemployment.

Study Methodology In Brief

The Transporters series, consisting of 15 five-minute episodes, features eight animated vehicles onto which real-life faces of actors have been superimposed. The actors’ ages, genders, and ethnicities were varied to enhance generalization. Each of the 15 episodes focuses on a particular emotion or mental state (e.g., happy, sad, angry). The developers believed that a series featuring vehicles that run on tracks or trolleys would be especially appealing to children with ASD, because the movement of the vehicles would be predictable and repetitive. They further reasoned that attaching faces to vehicles, which move in a predictable way, instead of to human bodies, which move in an unpredictable and confusing way, should enhance learning in children with ASD.

The DVD package includes 30 interactive quizzes and a guidebook for parents to use to facilitate their children’s learning.

The effectiveness of the British version was examined in a sample of children with ASD in the United Kingdom. Twenty children were given copies of The Transporter DVD and asked to watch at least three episodes every weekday for four weeks. Participants’ emotion recognition and vocabulary were tested before and after the intervention. Participants exhibited significant improvements in emotion recognition.

In Dr. Hobden’s study, three groups of 20 children (aged 3 to 8) will be recruited. The groups will consist of two clinical groups (ASD intervention and ASD control) and one group of typically developing children (typical control). Children in the ASD intervention group will be asked to watch at least 3 five-minute episodes every weekday for four weeks, for a total of at least 15 episodes per week. Parents will be asked to keep a log of the number of episodes their children watch. Children in the ASD control and typical control groups will receive no intervention.

Emotion recognition skills will be assessed at three time points: before the intervention, immediately after the intervention, and three months after the intervention. The results will be analyzed for changes in emotion recognition scores over time as a function of group membership while controlling for effects of age, gender, and verbal IQ.

Researcher

Karen Hobden, Ph.D., has been a research associate and coordinator of the Dual Diagnosis Project at the Developmental Disabilities Institute at Wayne State University since 2006. She has a doctoral and master’s degree in social psychology, with more than 15 years experience as a project manager in the field of mental health, including a five-year, longitudinal study of mental health outcomes in homeless youth and a 10-year follow-up of dementia in a representative sample of Canadian elderly.