Megan Critchlow - Psychology
The effectiveness of developing an autistic child’s Theory of Mind
I am going to be looking at 4 different training methods involved in the development of an
autistic child’s Theory of Mind, with studies to demonstrate how effective they are.
Social skills teaching and mindreading interventions
The first method I will be evaluating is “Social skills teaching and mindreading”, which
addresses the social awareness of an autistic child. This can be taught via methods ranging
from role-play and drama therapy to directly teaching specific social behaviours and rules.
One method created by Carol Gray (1991), cited by Baron-Cohen (2008), is social stories,
providing typical social situations and teaching social scripts, with the aim of helping
children predict what will happen in different circumstances. Swaggart et al. (1995), cited by
Frank J. Sansosti et al (2004), studied the effectiveness of social stories using 3 autistic
children, all with social deficits indicating impairments to their Theory of Minds. The first
participant showed a significant increase in appropriate social greetings from 7% to 57%,
additionally her aggressive behaviour decreased from 9% to 0%. The two other participants
sharing behaviours increased by 22% and 35% respectively and aggressive behaviours
decreased by 56% and 35% respectively. Developing a theory of mind includes gaining the
ability to recognise how to avoid behaviours that may hurt another’s feelings. Therefore this
decrease in undesirable social behaviours indicates an improvement of the child’s Theory of
Mind. Additionally the increase in sharing behaviours shows that the participants have
improved their ability to predict that others may also want to play with their toys. However
this study has limitations, due to a previous training model it is unclear as to whether the
improvements were solely due to social stories. Additionally due to the small sample size the
study would be difficult to generalise to other autistic children.
Thought-bubble training
Secondly the thought-bubble method is used to improve autistic children’s ability to
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