The deficit of social interaction and poor communication skill are primary aspect of autistic children. Over the past decades, a substantial body of research on autism have been focused on social cognition theory of mind. Theory of mind is one of the ...
The deficit of social interaction and poor communication skill are primary aspect of autistic children. Over the past decades, a substantial body of research on autism have been focused on social cognition theory of mind. Theory of mind is one of the essential abilities that makes us human. By theory of mind, we would be able to infer the full range of mental states that cause action. In others minds, we can reflect on the contents of one own and others minds. Many researches have suggested that core handicaps of autism result from a specific impairment in theory of mind. While a deficit in theory of mind underpins the impairments in social interaction and pragmatics, a successful method for teaching theory of mind may have alleviated the impairments in social interaction and communication skills that are so debilitating in autism.
This study was planned and implemented based on these assumptions. The first purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of a intervention program based on theory of mind in aspect of the theory of mind tasks performance. The second purpose was to investigate the impact of the intervention program in aspect of expressing mental state words and social skills. The last purpose was to investigate the maintenance of the effects of the intervention program.
Thirty children with autism attended this intervention program. After having test of IQ, PRES and CARS, they were divided into experimental group and control group with 15 children each. Experimental group was taught based on theory of mind but control group was not. Characteristics of participants were as follows; CA, MA and IQ were 6~13, 5 and higher than 50 respectively. They were trained in special classes of common elementary school of special school or speech and language therapy center or developmental center in Seoul and Kyunggi-Do.
To accomplish this study purpose, theory of mind training program was developed, including emotional and belief understanding activities. The experimental procedure was composed of pre-test, treatment of experiment, post-test, and maintenance test. Experimental training was conducted three times a week for 12 weeks in a quiet room of the subject school or center. Each session was 30-35 minutes long and was organized and run by one primary experimenter with three assistant.
To prove the effects of theory of mind intervention program, pre-test and post-test for control group was designed. The difference between pre-test and post-test of two group was analyzed with independent t-test using SPSS 10.0 program. And the maintenance of intervention programs effects in experimental group was analyzed with paired-samples t-test.
The result was summarized as follows;
First, a significant difference was found between the experimental group and control group in the performance of the tasks related to the emotion and belief based theory of mind, proving more improvement in the experimental group that participate in theory of mind intervention program.
Second, a significant difference was found between the experimental group and control group in terms of frequency and type of mental state words, showing more improvement in the experimental group that was participated in the theory of mind intervention program.
Third, significant difference was found between the experimental group and control group in social skills at school and home, providing more improvement in the experimental group that participated in the theory of mind intervention program.
Forth, In experimental group, the effects of the intervention program were maintained from the termination of the intervention program to 6 weeks later.
In conclusion, the results of this study support that the intervention program based on theory of mind can effectively improve theory of mind tasks performance, mental state words and social skills in children with autism.