Megan Critchlow - Psychology
The final training method I looked at was mindreading DVDs such as “The
Transporters”. Although Golen et al’s (2009) study lacked ecological validity, the
experiment indicated improvements of the autistic children within real life situations.
The children were able to generalise from the expressions on the animated trains to
recognise expressions on human faces from the photographs they were tested with.
This demonstrates the autistics child’s ability to transfer the developed method to
recognise emotions shown by humans. Which resultantly benefits the children in social
situations. For example without this ability the child may fail to recognise an
acquaintance’s emotional state and therefore ignore any signs of distress or upset
unaware of the circumstances.
Overall I have found all four interventions results translate to real life situations with a
positive effect. The development of a Theory of Mind allows the autistic children to
improve their behaviour within class resultantly improving their chances of better
grades. The decrease of aggressive or disruptive behaviour and increase in awareness of
others emotions improves the likelihood of successful relationships. These findings
demonstrate that an autistic child’s Theory of Mind can be developed to an extent
during real life situations, even if it is by alternative methods to normal children.
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