The Experimental Study On Emotion Understanding Of Children With Autism

Emotion understanding is an important component of children's theory of mind (ToM), referring conjecturing and understanding of children to other's facial expression and inner emotion states or processes, and consequent appropriate emotion responses and behavior to others. By deep experimental research on emotion understanding of children with autism, this study not only enrich the relevant content of emotion understanding in theory, but also further improved the hypothesis of ToM deficits of children with autism, and proposed some pertinent educational suggestions on the invention strategies of emotion understanding for children with autism.There are 14 children with autism are chosen as the experimental group in contrast to the other two groups of equal suited mental age and verbal ability, one of which is mental disorder and the other is normal children. All subjects participate in 5 emotion understanding tests which involved 4 kinds of basic emotion (happiness, sadness, anger and fright), including facial expression discrimination from photos and cartoons, emotion understanding on situation, desire and belief.By comparing with two control groups, the results indicate that: 1. the whole emotion understanding of children with autism is significantly lower than that of 5-year-old normal children and children with mental disorder. 2. Children with autism and children with mental disorder have similar performance in completing facial expression discrimination tasks, their development levels is equivalent to 5-year-old children. 3. Children with autism perform more poorly on facial expression discrimination form photos than cartoons. 4. The ability of inner emotion states or processes of children with autism is worse than 5-year-old normal children and children with mental disorder who have the suited mental age and verbal ability. 5. Children with autism have better understanding on positive emotion than negative emotion in 5 emotion understanding tests, but for three negative emotions, they have different cognitive models in different tasks.