Physical Activity in Homes 13 Teaching Empathy Skills to Children With Autism

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to teach empathetic responding to 4 children with autism. Instructors presented vignettes with dolls and puppets demonstrating various types of affect and used prompt delay, modeling, manual prompts, behavioral rehearsals, and reinforcement to teach participants to perform empathy responses. Increases in empathetic responding occurred systematically with the introduction of treatment across all participants and response categories. Furthermore, responding generalized from training to nontraining probe stimuli for all participants. Generalization occurred from dolls and puppets to actual people in a nontraining setting for 2 participants. Generalization was observed initially to the nontraining people and setting for the other participants, but responding subsequently decreased to baseline levels. Introduction of treatment in this setting produced rapid acquisition of target skills.

Acquisition and Generalization of Complex Empathetic Responses Among Children with Autism

“…Participants in the current study were taught to discriminate between three categories of affect (joy, frustration, and pain) and respond with a complex empathetic response that consisted of an appropriate verbal statement voiced in the correct intonation, using an appropriate gesture, and a facial expression that corresponded the affect displayed by conversation partner. Data from the current study are consistent with previous research teaching individuals with autism various units of empathetic responding (e.g., Gena et al, 1996;Buffington et al, 1998;Schrandt et al, 2009;Argott et al, 2008) and extend the previous research by teaching those units collectively.…”

“…Directly extending the research of Gena and her colleagues (1996,2005), and building upon the research conducted by Argott et al (2008) and Schrandt, et al (2009), Daou et al (2014) effectively increased the use of a more complex empathetic response that included statements, appropriate intonation, and facial expressions in three 9-13-year-old youths with ASD. Once again, reinforcement was provided for the appropriate use of the various components of the empathetic response with modeling and prompting used to teach the skills, Similar to Argott et al (2008) and Schrandt et al (2009), Daou and colleagues used errorless teaching procedures and systematically faded prompts as participants began to respond independently.…”

“…Additionally, as previously discussed, Argott et al (2008) incorporated the use of reinforcement and a script-fading procedure to increase the use of appropriate empathetic statements to affective motor discriminative stimuli. Likewise, Schrandt, Townsend, and Poulson (2009) incorporated a prompt-delay procedure using modeling and prompting to teach 4-6-year-old children with ASD to use empathetic statements and gestures towards puppets. In each of these studies, the participants were able to differentially respond to affective stimuli using appropriate empathetic responses.…”

“…Once again, reinforcement was provided for the appropriate use of the various components of the empathetic response with modeling and prompting used to teach the skills, Similar to Argott et al (2008) and Schrandt et al (2009), Daou and colleagues used errorless teaching procedures and systematically faded prompts as participants began to respond independently. Additionally, they used a scriptfading procedure to teach the verbal statements associated with each category of affect and a shaping procedure to reinforce appropriate facial expressions.…”

The Bonobo and the Behaviorist: Frans de Waal’s Bottom-Up Morality

“…However, empathy does not develop exclusively from this phylogenetic history; it is also informed by events that occur within the organism's life span. Indeed, it is possible to explicitly train empathetic responding using techniques such as modeling and prompting (e.g., Schrandt 2009). In behavior analysis, empathy may be viewed as a state in which an organism's behavior will be more readily reinforced by the removal of another's distress or by engaging in altruistic behavior.…”