| Abstract [eng] |
Autism spectrum disorder is currently an area of growing interest, due to its concept, the variety and uniqueness of the disorder itself. Although this disorder is currently of great interest to researchers, uncertainties and contradictions are still emerging. Common controversy is whether children with Autism spectrum disorders actually have an intact ability to recognize emotional facial expressions. Also in terms of expressive drawing, expressive drawing is currently a relatively little-studied field in the scientific literature. Due to contradictions and lack of research on children with Autism spectrum disorder, the aim of the work is to compare peculiarities of understanding emotions and expressive drawing of children with normal development and children with Autism spectrum Ddsorder. This study involved 32 children, first to fourth grade students of Vilnius „Sietuvos“ Progymnasium, children 7 – 11 years of age from the Panevėžys Day Center for Children with Autism spectrum disorder and the Lithuanian Autism Association „Lietaus vaikai“ Summer Camp. The age of the subjects ranged from 7 to 11 years. The study included 12 children with Autism spectrum disorder and 20 children with normal development. Brechet's (2017) drawings expressing emotional face expressions were used to explore the recognition of children's main emotional expressions, Brechet, Baldy, and Picard’s (2009) notation task was used to explore understanding of key emotions from presented verbal situations and the drawing task of Brechet, Baldy, and Picard (2009) was used to explore the expressive drawing of key emotions. The results of the study reveal that both children with Autism spectrum disorder and with normal development were able to recognize all the main emotions from the presented facial expressions. Also, no significant differences were found between children with normal development and those with Autism spectrum disorder in their perception of emotions from the presented verbal situations. No significant differences were found between children with Autism spectrum disorder who were provided with visual material and those who were not provided with visual material. No significant differences were found between the two groups in the use of graphical cues in expressive drawings. |
