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

ABSTRACT

This 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.

KEYWORDS:

• autism
• autism spectrum disorder
• social skills intervention
• drama
• theatre
• pragmatic language
• facial emotion recognition

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the Worthington City School District for their participation and cooperation in this study. We also want to thank the actors who facilitated the intervention, and the students and their parents who agreed to participate in the project. We would like to thank Stephanie Sanzo from Worthington City schools for her collaboration and facilitation. It should be noted that a portion of this article has been presented as a poster at the Ohio Maternal and Child Health Poster Symposium in May 2012, the 136th American Association of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Annual Meeting in June 2012, and the 2012 American Psychological Association Annual Convention.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported in part with funding from the US Administration on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities [grant number #99-DD-0621].