The ability to understand the emotional and mental states of others plays a key role for the adequate interpretation and reaction to other peoples’ behaviour within our social environment. This ability, as crucial as it is for living in a community, can vary greatly between people and may even be impaired severely, as in individuals on the autism spectrum.

In this project, we are creating a training software aiming at improving the perception and understanding of emotions. For the production of the training material, we are working with actors who display 40 different emotional states (e.g., happiness, envy, anger or enthusiasm) through facial expression, prosody and short films of social interactions. In three training modules participants learn to integrate emotional information of varying complexity from faces, voices, language, and context in a playful manner. Subsequently, we will test whether the different tasks used for the training are sensitive to the impairments in emotion understanding in individuals with autism (validation study).

In a second step, we will document the effectiveness of the new training software in a 12-week intervention program with 50 adults on the autism spectrum (intervention study). We will use various tests to assess the training’s success in a controlled environment as well as in everyday life. In addition to that, we will assess how the training program changes eye movements and the function and structure of the brain systems involved in emotion processing.