• The current study taught three autistic children to predict others’ emotions during contrived scenarios in which another’s desires were met or unmet.
• The treatment package included rules, modeling, prompting, reinforcement, and multiple exemplar training.
• All participants learned to accurately predict emotions and identify the cause across trained and novel scenarios. Direct in-vivo training was required for generalization of skills to real-life play situations.
• This study expands research on teaching perspective-taking skills to autistic children.
Persicke, A., Najdowski, A. C., Tarbox, J., & St. Clair, M. (2023). Teaching children with autism spectrum disorder desire-based emotion prediction and cause. Behavior Analysis in Practice, 16, 826-836. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-022-00765-x