Teaching Socially Expressive Behaviors to Children with Autism Through Video Modeling

Children with autism often lack complex socially expressive skills that would allow them to engage others more successfully. In the present study, video modeling was used to promote appropriate verbal comments, intonation, gestures, and facial expressions during social interactions of three children with autism. In baseline, the children rarely displayed any of the target behaviors. In treatment, each child watched a videotape of two persons interacting in a play setting. One person acted as the therapist and presented the social cues. The second acted as the child, and provided models of appropriate responses including verbal comments, intonation, gestures, and facial expressions. Results indicated that video modeling led to rapid acquisition of socially expressive behaviors. All three children reached criterion for all four target behaviors after viewing the video only three or four times. The children also displayed generalization of these socially expressive behaviors in probes across setting, stimuli, and persons.