Teaching emotions to benefit the social skills of students with autism spectrum disorders

This research reports if across a process of teaching-learning of the understanding of emotions and beliefs with student with ASD it is possible to improve the above mentioned understanding and that this one, in addition, implies positive changes on their social skills. For it, two pupils of primary education and one pupil of secondary education with ASD took part in a design of study of cases where, for the obtaining of data, didactic materials were designed and elaborated for the teaching of the understanding of emotions and beliefs, and an interview protocol of assessment of social skills for children with ASD. The pupils were evaluated before and after the process of educational intervention on their levels of understanding of emotions and beliefs, and social skills. It was resorted to the descriptive statistics for the procedure of analysis of quantitative data and to the analysis of content of the observations, interviews and commentaries of teachers and parents for the analysis of qualitative data. Results indicate that, after the process of educational intervention, the pupils improved their performance in tasks that evaluate the understanding of emotions and belief, and that this improvement accompanies of positive changes in their emotional and social skills. These results allow us to conclude that, adapting the educational process to the characteristics and needs of the student with ASD, the learning of the understanding of the emotions and beliefs can be constituted as a means to benefit other areas not explicitly taught, as social skills.