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Attention Modification to Attenuate Facial Emotion Recognition Deficits in Children with Autism: A Pilot Study

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Abstract

Diminished attending to faces may contribute to the impairments in emotion recognition and expression in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The current study evaluated the acceptability, feasibility, and preliminary efficacy of an attention modification intervention designed to attenuate deficits in facial emotion recognition (FER). During the 10-session experimental treatment, children (n = 8) with ASD watched dynamic videos of people expressing different emotions with the facial features highlighted to guide children’s attention. Children and their parents generally rated the treatment as acceptable and helpful. Although FER improvement was not apparent on task-based measures, parents reported slight improvements and decreased socioemotional problems following treatment. Results suggest that further research on visual attention retraining for ASD, within an experimental therapeutic program, may be promising.

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded by Organization for Autism Research Graduate Research Grant and the Routh Research and Dissertation Grant through Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, APA Division 53. We are grateful to the children and families who participated in this study. We also greatly appreciate the help from Stephanie Roldan, who has aided in the development of the Matlab code to analyze the eye-tracking data.

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  1. Susan W. White

    Present address: Center for Youth Development and Intervention, The University of Alabama, 200 Hackberry Lane, 101 McMillan Bldg., Box 870348, Tuscaloosa, AL, 35487, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, 24061, USA

    Andrea Trubanova Wieckowski & Susan W. White

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  1. Andrea Trubanova Wieckowski
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  2. Susan W. White
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Contributions

ATW and SWW contributed to the study conception and design. ATW performed data collection, data analysis, and drafted the manuscript. SWW contributed to revision of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Susan W. White.

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Wieckowski, A.T., White, S.W. Attention Modification to Attenuate Facial Emotion Recognition Deficits in Children with Autism: A Pilot Study. J Autism Dev Disord 50, 30–41 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-019-04223-6

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