Many individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have difficulty recognizing emotions in themselves and others. Three children (all males) participated in the study. In a multi-element design children with ASD were trained to tact situation-based emotions (i.e., “happy”, “sad”, “angry”, and “afraid”) using novel video based scenarios. To increase the likelihood that each child would learn a generalized repertoire of emotion understanding, multiple exemplars of emotion identification were trained using a multi-component procedure. The results indicated significant increases in tacting situation-based emotions. To evaluate the generalization of training, novel video stories were employed that depicted the trained emotions. The findings indicated generalization of situation-based emotional tacting to the novel video stories.
