Teaching emotion recognition skills to children with autism.

Autism is associated with difficulty interacting with others and an impaired ability to recognize facial expressions of emotion. Previous teaching programmes have not addressed weak central coherence. Emotion recognition training focused on components of facial expressions. The training was administered in small groups ranging from 4 to 7 children. Improvements were significantly better for the training group (n = 20, mean age 9 years, 3 months) than a waiting list control group (n = 10, mean age 10 years, 7 months). Pre and post measures revealed an effect size of the training of Cohen's d = 1.42. The impact of the training was highly significant. There was evidence of some generalisation of the emotion recognition and improvements at follow-up.