Teaching Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Desire-Based Emotion Prediction and Cause
A short BST loop can teach children with autism to predict feelings from desires, but you must also practice in the actual play area.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Persicke et al. (2023) worked with three children with autism.
The team wanted to teach the kids to guess how someone else feels when that person gets or does not get what they want.
They used a full BST package: rules, modeling, prompting, and praise.
Kids practiced many different stories so the skill would stick.
What they found
All three children learned to predict emotions from desires.
They could do it with new stories they had never heard.
When the same skill was needed during free play, extra practice in the play area was required.
The lesson: teach the rule, then practice right where the child will use it.
How this fits with other research
Fyfe et al. (2007) showed that children with autism often miss cues about what others want.
Persicke’s study is the next step: it proves you can teach that missing skill with BST.
Hood et al. (2022) used the same BST steps to teach kids to spot shared interests.
Both papers show the package works for different social goals.
Agana et al. (2025) also found that play settings need their own practice time.
Together these studies say: plan for extra in-vivo reps whenever the room or toys change.
Why it matters
You can add a five-minute emotion-prediction drill to your social-skills group.
State the rule, model one example, let the learner try, then praise.
If you want the child to use the skill on the playground or with new toys, practice right there.
Bring the stories and the reinforcers to the slide, the sandbox, or the doll corner.
One extra session in the real spot can save weeks of table-only progress.
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Pick one play routine, model “He wanted the truck, so he feels sad,” then prompt and praise the child for saying the emotion before they touch the toy.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study aimed to expand current research in one area of perspective taking related to teaching children with autism spectrum disorder to predict others’ emotions. The current study evaluated a behavioral teaching procedure on predicting and inferring the cause of emotions based on another’s desires. The procedure included a training package including multiple-exemplar training, rules, modeling, prompting, and reinforcement across scenarios in which children with autism were asked to predict how others may feel given a met or unmet desire or nondesire. Three children with autism, who did not already demonstrate this skill at baseline, were included in the study and learned a repertoire of emotion prediction and cause that generalized to untrained novel scenarios. Generalization to situations in which it was necessary to apply information about another’s desires during play activities was not observed until direct in-vivo training was implemented. Future directions and implications of this research are discussed.
Behavior Analysis in Practice, 2023 · doi:10.1007/s40617-022-00765-x