Shakespeare and autism: an exploratory evaluation of the Hunter Heartbeat Method

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis preliminary report describes the Hunter Heartbeat Method, a drama-based social skills intervention designed to improve the social interaction, pragmatic language, and facial-emotion recognition skills of individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Fourteen children with autism spectrum disorder were recruited for the first-ever systematic implementation of this drama-based intervention. Piloting of post-test measures indicated that the participants’ scores increased across time on measures of social skills, communication, and pragmatic language. Furthermore, the Penn Facial Recognition's facial emotion recognition task, a computer-based facial emotion task, detected change in skill across time. Importantly, the intervention was acceptable to participants and parents and feasible to implement. The preliminary results need to be replicated with a larger number of participants and within a more controlled design. However, these findings indicate that Hunter Heartbeat Method shows promise in improving the social and communicative functioning of children with autism spectrum disorder.