Teaching Children with Autism to Identify Private Events of Others in Context.

Many children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder have difficulties identifying and labeling emotions of others. Three adolescent males all diagnosed with ASD participated in the study. In a multi-element design, the participants were trained to tact private events of others in context using novel video-based scenarios. Two of the three participants were able to increase and maintain their responding for all trained, derived, and transformation of stimulus function relations. The third participant required multiple-exemplar training of novel stimuli to increase his responding for all the video-based scenarios. The results of the study support the utility of relational training for teaching children with autism to identify private events of others in context.