Megan Critchlow - Psychology
understand others thinking patterns, therefore developing their Theory of Minds. Paynter J.
and Peterson C.C. (2012) study, tests the thought bubble method, using a comprehensive
assessment upon the children’s verbal and nonverbal skills with an additional delayed follow
up test. The study included 24 children on the autism scale, aged 4-12 years old. Using the
Theory of Mind scale that is out of 5, the 17 children that used thought-bubble method
training along with other interventions progressed on the total Theory of Mind scale from
2.00 to 3.06 and in the post-test evaluation reached an average of 4.11. The control group that
were involved in no other intervention improved from 2.71 to 2.86, with a mean follow-up
score of 3.33. The results additionally showed that there were benefits for Theory of Mind
concepts beyond false-belief, such as complex concepts like “people feel happy if they think
they are getting what they want”. Additionally improvements could be maintained for at least
3 weeks, however due to being a comprehensive assessment the study had a low ecological
validity.
Mindreading DVDs
Thirdly mindreading DVDs are now available as a teaching mechanism for autistic children.
These DVDs include hundreds of emotions displayed on actor’s faces and within their voices,
with no gender bias. The child must recognise the emotion displayed by the actor.
For autistic pre-schoolers an animation “The transporters” has been created. It is based on
vehicles appealing to the child’s systematic interest, where facial expressions of different
emotions have been placed onto the animated vehicles. Golen et al (2009) demonstrated the
effectiveness of The Transporters DVD. The study included 3 groups of 18 participants, the
first group were autistic children whose parents showed them 3 episodes of the Transporters
per day for 4 weeks, the second group were autistic children involved in no interventions and
the final group were normal children. Each group was tested at 4 different levels, the first
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