Enhancing emotion recognition in young autistic children with or without attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in...

This study was registered with the German Clinical Trials Register - Deutschen Register Klinischer Studien (DRKS) on 23 December 2018. The Trial Registration Number (TRN) is DRKS00016506.

The Transporters App is an intervention programme with 15 animated episodes that teach emotion recognition skills to autistic children between 4 and 6 years of age. Each episode contains a story depicting social interactions between characters in the form of a vehicle, with human faces grafted on to each of them. Each episode teaches a specific emotion in a story context. Autistic children watched at least three episodes at home for about 15 min daily for a month, with parental guidance. Its automated, home-based format is cost-saving and readily accessible. This study translated The Transporters to a Cantonese-Chinese version. Results showed a significant improvement in emotion recognition following viewing The Transporters in a group of Hong Kong Chinese autistic children, between 4 and 6 years of age, with and without attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (n = 48) relative to a control group (n = 24). A non-autistic group (n = 23) showed that the autistic children scored lower in emotion recognition pre-intervention. Post-intervention, the autistic children had improved in emotion recognition to the level of the non-autistic children. The autistic children in the intervention groups also generalized their learning to novel situations/characters not taught within The Transporters. There was no dosage effect, with the standard recommended number of episodes viewed being sufficient to achieve significant improvement. This study confirms the effectiveness of The Transporters for Chinese autistic children and contributes to the literature/practice by expanding the range of applicability of The Transporters to autistic children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, which is important given the high rate of co-occurrence between autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.