I see you smile, you must be happy! Social-emotional gains and usability evaluation of the new training tool E.V.A.: A pilot study

Emotions are a complex concept and they are present in our everyday life. Persons on the autism spectrum are said to have difficulties in social interactions, showing deficits in emotion recognition in comparison to neurotypically developed persons. But social-emotional skills are believed to be positively augmented by training. A new adaptive social cognition training tool “E.V.A.” is introduced which teaches emotion recognition from face, voice and body language. One cross-sectional and one longitudinal study with adult neurotypical and autistic participants were conducted. The aim of the cross-sectional study was to characterize the two groups and see if differences in their social-emotional skills exist. The longitudinal study, on the other hand, aimed for detecting possible training effects following training with the new training tool. In addition, in both studies usability assessments were conducted to investigate the perceived usability of the new tool for neurotypical as well as autistic participants. Differences were found between autistic and neurotypical participants in their social-emotional and emotion recognition abilities. Training effects for neurotypical participants in an emotion recognition task were found after two weeks of home training. Similar perceived usability was found for the neurotypical and autistic participants. The current findings suggest that persons with ASC do not have a general deficit in emotion recognition, but are in need for more time to correctly recognize emotions. In addition, findings suggest that training emotion recognition abilities is possible. Further studies are needed to verify if the training effects found for neurotypical participants also manifest in a larger ASC sample.

Level thesis:degree_level

master

Grantor dc:publisher

Universität Potsdam

Year

2021

Author dc:creator

• Blum, Franziska

Contributors dc:contributor

• Weigand, Anne
• Engbert, Ralf

• autism
• emotion recognition
• social cognition training
• Autismus
• Emotionserkennung
• Training Sozialer Kognition

Statement dc:rights

• CC-BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International

Repository record source_url

https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/50550

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:kobv.de-opus4-uni-potsdam:50550