Reading the Research: Reading Facial Expressions

Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.

Today's article showcases a possible future for social skills training.  Currently, most social skills training is done with therapists, one-on-one, until certain benchmarks are met and the person can advance to a group setting.  But there's a massive lack of therapists, and even more than that, a massive lack of resources and transportation.  It is not, sadly, the case that only children of affluent families develop autism.  It's just more quickly recognized in such families, because the pace of life is less frantic, the parents have more time to spend with the children, and the teachers are less likely to be juggling 35 students at once. 

The children of immigrants or racial minorities may find themselves more or less on their own when it comes to learning social skills.  But it's becoming more and more common for people to have a smart phone, even very low income people.  The devices used along with the smartphones, in this study, may never be easily available to low-income people, but the basic idea could be used in a regular phone app.  Or, as technology continues to advance, a virtual reality version might be created to work in a similar way. 

Anyway, the idea was to make a game out of reading facial expressions.  This is important, because in some cases autistic people actually don't recognize that peoples' faces have useful information written across them, if only they understood how to read that information.  The Google Glass accessory was used to record peoples' face and prompt the children to name the emotion, or note a valid facial expression that was inside the field of vision.  The technology was limited to 8 basic facial expressions.

The results were promising.  Having been given the training (disguised as a game) to identify facial expressions, the children proceeded to use those skills, and were quite enthusiastic about doing so.  They also tended to make more eye contact, which is essential for catching those facial expressions as they're made. 

The therapeutic program is scheduled for a much larger trial, and I'll be interested to see the results from that, particularly how it compares to, say, insurance-accepted practices like Applied Behavioral Analysis.  Having self-help options for therapy, even ones this basic, is extremely important, and probably an excellent step forward toward having therapy available for everyone. 

I'm not really sure how I learned to read facial expressions, but I think I can safely say that I do still have some trouble recognizing expressions on unfamiliar faces.  Having a gameified trainer to help me categorize expressions, even into just 8 basic categories, would have been immensely helpful.  Honestly, if I had this technology, I'd probably go to the local mall with it and watch people, just to see what things the game would notice that I didn't.