Brief report: assessment of the social-emotional profile in children with autism spectrum disorders using a novel comic strip task.
A short comic-strip quiz cleanly shows which young children with autism struggle to read intentions.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team built a short comic-strip task. Kids looked at four-panel cartoons and answered questions.
They tested children with autism and same-age peers without autism. All kids were between 4 and 8 years old.
What they found
Children with autism scored lower on the whole task. The gap was largest on questions about 'why' a character acted.
Both groups did the same on simple feeling questions. The strip task flagged intention problems, not emotion labeling.
How this fits with other research
Golan et al. (2008) saw the same pattern using short film clips instead of cartoons. Both studies show kids with autism miss hidden social goals.
Lance et al. (2014) looked deeper and found the gap shrinks when you make sure the child looks at the speaker’s face. Their work refines the target paper: intention understanding is shaky only when face cues are ignored.
Brosnan et al. (2015) seems to disagree—adolescents with autism beat peers on cartoon emotion tasks. The twist is age: older kids may use different strategies, so the negative finding in 4-8 year-olds still holds.
Why it matters
You now have a one-page comic tool that spots intention-understanding gaps in young clients. Use it during intake to see who needs social-cognitive targets. Pair the results with simple face-gaze training, following Lance et al. (2014), to turn assessment data into a quick intervention plan.
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Join Free →Print a four-panel comic, ask 'Why did the girl open the box?' and note if the child cites hidden intent.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study investigated whether the novel Comic Strip Task (CST) could be used to detect Theory-of-Mind impairments (ToM) in 4- to 8-year-old children with high functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Twelve children with either high-functioning autism or Asperger's Disorder and 12 typically-developing children completed the 21-item measure. The overall CST demonstrated moderate internal consistency but the Belief-understanding subscale was excluded from the test due to poor reliability. As predicted, the ASD group performed significantly more poorly than controls on the overall 2-subscale CST and on the intention-understanding subscale. No group differences were found in emotion-understanding subscale performance. Controlling for age, verbal ability was positively correlated with overall CST performance across groups. CST performance in the ASD group positively correlated with parent-reports of communication difficulties. Despite some limitations with the belief-understanding subscale, the CST has promising psychometric features warranting further development of this measure.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2012 · doi:10.1007/s10803-012-1498-8