SERIOUS GAMES TO TEACH EMOTION RECOGNITION TO CHILDREN WITH AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDERS (ASD)

The serious game "JeStiMulE" (Educational Game for Multisensory Stimulation of Children with developmental disorders), developed by the Autism Resources Center of Nice, was created to teach social cognition including emotion recognition for children and adolescents with autism. The purpose of our study is to investigate the effectiveness of the serious game JESTIMULE in remediating recognition' deficits of emotional facial expressions (EFE) in autistic children. Thirty-two Moroccan children and adolescents were recruited for this study. All participants received a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Diseases, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV-R) criteria for ASD, as well as the Rimland Checklist E2. IQ level has been assessed by using Raven's Progressive Matrices as an IQ testing scale. The participants received two one-hour JeStiMulE sessions per week over four weeks. Game data were collected for each participant. The Faces test was used to quantify the progression of the ability to recognize emotions in our subjects. The results of the descriptive analyses showed suitable adaptability, effectiveness and efficiency of JeStiMulE. In Faces test, a significant difference between scores of the Pre-intervention and Post-intervention (Z= -3.58, p<0.001), in favour of the Post-intervention (M=23.22, SD=2.96 versus M=27.27, SD=2.77). That indicate that participants were more accurate at recognizing emotions after JeStiMulE. In addition, a main effect of type of autism was found for the facial scale (H = 6.673, ddl = 2, p = 0.036). High-functioning autism were significantly better than Low-functioning autism at recognizing emotions from faces in both Pre-intervention and Post-intervention. With such non-verbal tool, training could start early. Thus, early management, the more the progression in the recognition and imitation of facial expressions is important, the more we gain autonomy and social integration just in time to begin school.