Brief Description

 

Chris is a five-year-old boy with autism. He has good basic conversational skills and can interact reasonably well with others. He has problems with frequent disruptive behavior, including making unintelligible noises.

 

Chris's socialization is progressing more slowly than it should because he has difficulty expressing his emotions and identifying the emotional expressions of others. He also has a very short attention span making extended teaching sessions a challenge.

 

In this short vignette, Chris will begin to learn about emotions by learning to make the appropriate facial expression when an emotion is named.

Detailed Description

 

Goal

 

Chris is learning to display appropriate facial expressions when asked.

 

Teaching Sequence

 

Beth asks Chris to show the specific emotions of "happy" and "surprised." Other emotions such as "sad" and "angry" were included in the training sequence, but are not shown in this clip.

 

Consequences

 

When Chris makes the correct facial expression, Beth responds with verbal praise. When Chris responds inappropriately by making noises or saying "cheese," those responses are ignored. That is, incorrect and disruptive responses are put on extinction. If Chris makes an incorrect facial expression, Beth will respond by saying "no" followed with a prompt for the correct response.

 

What to Look For

 

Beth is working with Chris across a table in a relatively structured setting. This was done because Chris was often disruptive. The structured setting helped him focus on the lesson.

 

Chris has not yet learned to reliably attend to others during a social interaction. To help Chris focus on her requests, Beth says his name before each trial and asks him a question as soon as he looks at her. Because the answering the question correctly is rewarded, the question itself becomes a reward for paying attention.

 

Chris has a very short attention span. To keep his attention, Beth's responses are natural, cheerful, and, most important, frequent. She is clearly interested in Chris, and is not simply engaging in a mechanical teaching task.

 

What Comes Next?

 

Chris is having success with demonstrating facial expressions. As he learns to make and identify more emotions in the structured setting, he will practice this skill in other settings and with other people.

 

Eventually, he will be asked to make the correct expression when a situation is described, or explain why someone else reacted a certain way.