Association for Behavior Analysis International

The purpose of this symposium is to present theory and research focused on improving the responding of individuals with autism to the emotions of others. To engage in social referencing, empathy, and helping individuals must be able to respond to the verbal and non-verbal emotional displays of others as discriminative stimuli. Individuals with autism display challenges orienting toward and responding to these social stimuli and behavior analytic instruction can be been used to alleviate these deficits. This symposium will begin with a discussion of social referencing from a behavior-analytic framework. The second paper presents a demonstration of the effects of discrimination training on the differential responding to joyful and fearful expressions within social referencing. The third paper will focus on the effects of a teaching package to train empathetic responses by adolescents with autism using socially mediated reinforcers. The fourth paper will present a comparison of group and individual instruction to teach empathy and helping.

BCBAs, BCaBAs

During social referencing, infants as young as 6 months of age look to others when confronted with unfamiliar or unexpected events in the environment as a means of determining how to respond to such events. Typically, approach or avoidance responses are learned by responding to positive and negative affective cues of the parent or caregiver (e.g., smiling and frowning). Unfortunately, social referencing repertoires are limited, delayed, or completely lacking in children with autism. Despite these documented social deficits, to date there has been only one published study that has focused on ameliorating social referencing deficits in children with autism. In this study we used a multiple baseline design across three participants to determine the effects of discrimination training, verbal instructions, and manual guidance on the differential responding of children with autism to fearful and joyful expressions. All three participants learned to discriminate the expressions presented within the context of social referencing but generalization to others was limited. A discussion of social referencing and future directions for research will be presented.

Previous research has demonstrated that children and adolescents who show empathy and towards others are likely to increase their opportunities for future interactions with peers and family members. This study extended the work of Garcia-Albea, Reeve, Reeve, Kisamore, LeBlanc, and Brothers (2015) to teach empathetic responses to four adolescent males with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A treatment package consisting of video modeling, audio and manual prompts, behavior rehearsals, and socially mediated consequences was used to teach empathy. It further programed for generalization using a three-component generalization strategy (i.e., general-case analysis, multiple-exemplar training, and experimenter-defined categories). Each empathy category was comprised of nine compound discriminative stimuli, that programmed for generalization from trained to novel compound discriminative stimuli. A multiple probe across participants design was used to assess the effectiveness of the treatment package and the degree of empathetic response acquisition across participants.The results indicated the effectiveness of the treatment package and empathetic responses maintained in the absence of the treatment package. Further, the skill generalized from trained to novel compound discriminative stimuli and from untrained to a novel empathy category.

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have deficits in language and social skills that make it difficult to learn to initiate and respond to others. Individual and group instruction have been used to teach different social behaviors but confounds have been noted in the research in how skills have been assessed. A two by two factorial design was used to compare group and individual instruction to determine which form of instruction was more effective to teach eight children with ASD empathy and helping skills. Four of the participants were taught empathy and helping with group instruction and the other four were taught empathy and helping with individual instruction. Video models were presented either individually or in a group, questions were posed to participants, and in-vivo assessment trials were conducted individually in separate rooms. Generalization probes were conducted using a novel empathy and helping scenario and maintenance data was collected one week, two weeks, and four weeks after the completion of the intervention. All participants learned helping and empathy skills, generalized these skills to novel situations, and maintained them, however, no differences was found between group or individual instruction.