Geneva Centre for Autism

Outline of Presentation:

In this presentation we will explore in more in detail the impact of the reduced contextual sensitivity in ASD on social cognitions and social skills, such as face perception, emotion recognition, theory of mind abilities, and social problem solving abilities.
Topics that will be covered are:

• The role of context in emotion recognition and why traditional emotion recognition training programs are of limited use for people with ASD. We should teach them to recognize contexts, not emotions.
• Theory of Mind requires contextual sensitivity: why ToM-training is useless without attention to the role of context in understanding other people’s mind.
• How to make people with ASD more independent and flexible in their social skills: contextualized social skills training, including context-sensitive Social Stories.
• How clarification of context and pushing the “context button” can overcome social misunderstanding and social faux pas in ASD.