A Virtual Joy-Stick Study of Emotional Responses and Social Motivation in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

A new virtual reality task was employed which uses preference for interpersonal distance to social stimuli to examine social motivation and emotion perception in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Nineteen high function children with higher functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (HFASD) and 23 age, gender, and IQ matched children with typical development (TD) used a joy stick to position themselves closer or further from virtual avatars while attempting to identify six emotions expressed by the avatars, happiness, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and surprise that were expressed at different levels of intensity. The results indicated that children with HFASD displayed significantly less approach behavior to the positive happy expression than did children with TD, who displayed increases in approach behavior to higher intensities of happy expressions. Alternatively, all groups tended to withdraw from negative emotions to the same extent and there were no diagnostic group differences in accuracy of recognition of any of the six emotions. This pattern of results is consistent with theory that suggests that some children with HFASD display atypical social-approach motivation, or sensitivity to the positive reward value of positive social–emotional events. Conversely, there was little evidence that a tendency to withdraw from social–emotional stimuli, or a failure to process social emotional stimuli, was a component of social behavior task performance in this sample of children with HFASD.

Technology-Facilitated Diagnosis and Treatment of Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Engineering Perspective

“…In [59], the Game Studio A6 rendering engine from Conitec, Germany was used to produce the avatars and the corresponding scenes used in their study. In this study, the participants were asked to identify the emotion of the avatar, which could be happy, sad, surprise, anger, disgust, and fear.…”

“…A participant was allowed to control the virtual distance between the participant and the avatar via joystick so that he/she could position the avatar to the most comfortable distance for emotion identification. For each emotion, there are four levels of emotional intensity (ranging from vague, neutral, to clear and strong) with corresponding facial expression (at 10, 40, 70, and 100%) and body gesture (such as "clasp hands, raise shoulder, shakes head, arms crossed, look down, step back" [59]). Furthermore, the rendering engine also enabled lip-synch animation to increase the fidelity of the verbal interaction.…”

“…To collect direct input from a participant, a conventional approach is to use a menu-driven interface or to display all possible options on the screen where a participant would choose the right answer from several response options using the mouse pointer [40,41,[59][60][61]. It is also common to require a participant to type a key as the answer, for example, "A" for the anger emotion, and "H" for the happy emotion.…”

Introduction to Technologies in the Daily Lives of Individuals with Autism

“…In contrast to other recent virtual reality work examining therapeutic or educational aspects of virtual reality (e.g. Bekele et al 2014;Smith et al 2015), Kim et al (2015) examine how technological platforms may provide additional insights regarding phenotypic variation at the group or individual level. This last area, that of the exceptional monitoring and dense data collection capabilities of many technological platforms, is especially topical as it can often be overshadowed by a singular focus on therapeutic outcomes.…”

“…This study highlights the potential for semi-automated systems to affect behaviors and foster skill acquisition, as well as underscoring the utility of broader monitoring for examining generalization even within more narrowly defined instructional areas. In a study by Kim et al (2015), a joy stick is used to virtually control the distance between the observer and an avatar displaying one of six emotional expressions. In contrast to other recent virtual reality work examining therapeutic or educational aspects of virtual reality (e.g.…”