Unique effects of The transporters animated series and of parental support on emotion recognition skills of children with ASD: Results of a randomized controlled trial.
Eight weeks of five-minute Transporters clips plus parent talk boosts and keeps emotion-recognition skills in young autistic children.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers mailed families a DVD set called The Transporters. The show pairs toy vehicles with real faces showing eight emotions.
Kids watched one five-minute episode every day for eight weeks. Half the parents got coaching on how to pause, label, and ask questions.
All children were 4- to 7-year-olds with high-functioning autism. The team tested emotion skills before, after, and three months later.
What they found
Children who watched the clips improved on every emotion test. Gains stayed strong three months later.
Kids whose parents joined the talk-aloud improved even more. They also used the skills with new faces and new places.
How this fits with other research
Ka-Cheng et al. (2024) ran the same show as a Cantonese phone app. Their preschoolers also reached typical peers’ emotion scores. Together the two RCTs show the effect travels across languages and formats.
van Timmeren et al. (2016) showed that emotion perception, not social complexity, trips up autistic face processing. The Transporters trial builds on that idea by zeroing in on emotion recognition.
O’Connor et al. (2020) taught emotion matching with flashcards and derived relations. Both studies prove emotion skills can be trained, but video modeling reaches families at home without tabletop drills.
Why it matters
You can send a low-cost DVD or app link home tonight. Ask parents to watch one clip, pause when the face freezes, and have the child name the feeling. Add a quick parent script and you copy the study’s strongest dose.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Emotion recognition (ER) and understanding deficits are characteristic of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The Transporters (TT) animated series has shown promising results in teaching children with ASD to recognize emotions, with mixed findings about generalization and maintenance of effects. This study aimed to evaluate the unique role of TT and of parental support in the acquisition, generalization, and maintenance of acquired ER skills in children with ASD. 77 Israeli children with high functioning ASD, aged 4-7 were randomly assigned into four groups according to a 2 × 2 design of the factors Series (TT, control series) and Parental Support (with/without). Thirty typically developing children, matched to the ASD groups on mental age, were tested with no intervention. Participants' ER (on three generalization levels) and emotional vocabulary (EV) were tested pre and post 8 weeks of intervention, and at 3 months' follow-up. Compared to the control series, watching TT significantly improved children's ER skills at all generalization levels, with good skill maintenance. All groups improved equally on EV. The amount of parental support given, in the groups that had received it, contributed to the generalization and maintenance of ER skills. Autism severity negatively correlated with ER improvement. The current study provides evidence to the unique role of TT in ER skill acquisition, generalization, and maintenance in children with high functioning ASD. In addition, this study provides evidence for a successful cultural adaptation of TT to a non-English speaking culture. Autism Res 2017, 10: 993-1003. © 2016 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2017 · doi:10.1002/aur.1717