A Study Of Equine-assisted Interventions In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders

Children with ASD have a severe social disorder,unable to initiate social interactions,and their positive affect differ from those of other children.All these seriously affect the growth and development of autistic children.Therefore,the use of effective autism intervention is an important topic that special education should pay attention to and solve.Equine-assisted intervention is an intervention that intentionally incorporates horses into the treatment or improvement process.It is widely used in the fields of medicine,psychology and pedagogy.In recent years,equine-assisted intervention has attracted more attention in the field of autism intervention.For autistic children with limited effects of traditional intervention,equine-assisted intervention is of great significance.Foreign researches on equine-assisted intervention for autistic children are numerous and have developed rapidly in recent years.These studies found that equine-assisted intervention has a positive effect on improving social communication,abnormal behavior and motor function of autistic children.In contrast,there was a terrible shortage of domestic related research.Therefore,this study selected 3 children with ASD for equine-assisted intervention to explore the effect of equine-assisted intervention on social initiation and positive affect of autistic children.So as to fill the gap of empirical research on equine-assisted intervention in the field of education in China and promote the research progress of equine-assisted intervention in the field of ASD.The study used A-B-A design of single subject research and targeted the social initiation behavior and positive affect of autistic children.Three autistic children aged 69 years with significant social initiation disorder were evaluated for the incidence of social initiation behavior and the occurrence rate of positive emotions at baseline,intervention and maintenance.In this study,visual analysis,C statistics,effect size and overlap rate were used to analyze behavioral observation data to explore the intervention effect and maintenance effect of equine-assisted intervention on 3 autistic children.The study also added two standardized tests before and after the intervention:Social Response Scale,SRS)and Autistic Behavior Checklist,ABC),to measure the changes of social disorder and other behaviors of the three children with ASD,and further verified the results through interviews.The results show that:a)equine-assisted intervention can improve the social initiation behavior of autistic children to varying degrees,and can be well maintained and improved in the short term;b)equine-assisted intervention can improve the motor social initiation and verbal social initiation of autistic children,and the maintenance effect is good;c)the improvement effect of equine-assisted intervention on the motor social initiation of autistic children is better than that of the verbal social initiation;d)equineassisted intervention has a large effect size on the positive affect of autistic children who are obsessed with horses,but the maintenance effect is poor;e)the children with ASD are in a good mood during the equine-assisted intervention,and have made progress in movement,language,attention and obedience to instructions.To sum up,equine-assisted intervention has good intervention effect on social initiation behavior of autistic children,but the intervention effect on positive affect of autistic children is quite different.Besides social initiation and positive affect,equine-assisted intervention also has positive effects on other aspects of autistic children.