Using Multiple Exemplar Training to Teach Empathy Skills to Children with Autism
Rotate faces, places, and feelings during short empathy drills and kids with autism will generalize kindness without extra work.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Two boys with autism, ages 6 and 8, took part. The team wanted to teach them to show empathy when someone looked sad, hurt, or happy.
They used multiple exemplar training. That means they practiced the same skill with many different people, places, and pictures. No extra generalization tricks were added.
The design was a multiple baseline across behaviors. The kids started with zero empathetic comments. The team measured if they could say kind things to new people and photos they had never seen.
What they found
Both boys quickly learned to give comfort, ask questions, or share joy when they saw feelings. Their responses jumped from a large share to over a large share during training.
The big win: the skill moved to new faces, new rooms, and new photos without any extra teaching. Generalization happened on its own.
How this fits with other research
Owen et al. (2024) used the same MET plan to teach grammar words like "a" and "the." Kids generalized those tiny words too. The pattern shows MET can spread both social and language skills.
Patton et al. (2020) also ran MET with a script-fading twist for joint attention. All kids generalized, just like here. The extra scripts did not beat plain MET for generalization.
Peters et al. (2013) found that higher empathy in autism can link to more reactive hitting. That sounds scary, but it is a reminder: teach calming steps right after you teach empathy so kindness stays safe.
Why it matters
You can grow real empathy in kids with autism without fancy tech or long programs. Pick three feeling states, rotate lots of faces and places, and keep practice short and fun. The skill is likely to stick and travel. Add a quick calm-down step and you have a full social package ready for Monday morning.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Pick three photos each of sad, happy, and hurt faces. Practice kind words for five minutes with two different adults in two rooms. Track if the child says something nice to a new photo at snack time.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
The purpose of the study was to use multiple exemplar training to teach empathetic responding to two children with autism. Three emotions—happiness, frustration and sadness/pain—were chosen for this purpose. Treatment consisted of verbal prompting and reinforcement of empathetic responses. Four experimenter-defined categories with discriminative stimuli were used for each emotion. The multiple exemplar component of the model consisted of teaching responses in the presence of several discriminative stimuli drawn from the predefined categories for each emotion delivered by two persons across two environments. Results were evaluated using a multiple baseline design across behaviours and indicate a systematic increase in responses with the introduction of treatment across each category for both participants. Generalization of responses from training to non-training stimuli in both participants was observed during probe trials and was maintained during follow-up probes.
Behavior Analysis in Practice, 2017 · doi:10.1007/s40617-017-0183-y