What’s this project about?
Research indicates that it is common for autistic youth to struggle with emotional problems. These youth often experience co-occurring anxiety, depression, or anger because of difficulties in regulating their emotions. The Secret Agent Society program (developed by Dr. Renae Beaumont) is a cognitive behavioral social skills group that is effective in improving the emotional understanding and social skills of autistic children. To further build on the Secret Agent Society program, an adaptation coined as Operation Regulation aims to use a variety of activities and tools to help autistic youth cope with their emotions and handle the day-to-day stressors in their lives. We collaborated with the creator of the Secret Agent Society, Dr. Renae Beaumont of The Social Skills Training Institute on this project.
How did we go about doing this project?
The program involved 10 weekly 1-hour visits to ¿ì²¥ÊÓƵ, where the youth and a parent met with a therapist for one-on-one therapy. There was no cost for the therapy. During those sessions, the youth got to do an assortment of activities and play games – computer games, problem-solving tasks, role-playing, and working with the therapist and parent. They also got some brief at home tasks to help them generalize what they were learning. The focus of all of these activities was to help build their emotion regulation skills.
This was a research project to see if our intervention can be helpful. Youth and their parents came to ¿ì²¥ÊÓƵ for two assessment sessions before they started the intervention (one for a face to face screening and the other for an in-depth assessment of emotion regulation skills), and two assessment sessions after they enrolled in the intervention. The assessments included filling out questionnaires (some online), completing some computer tasks, and participating in some short interviews.
Who was involved?
We were looking for children between 8 and 12 years of age with a formal diagnosis of autism. Children needed to have at least average language skills and be interested in working on emotions with a therapist.
What will we do with our research findings?
The results of this study will provide us with an understanding of emotion regulation processes for autistic people, and help us to improve the intervention. Results of this study may also lead to a reduction of youth’s levels of negative emotions and improvement in youth's abilities to control their emotions. We will write an article summarizing our findings to submit to an academic journal, present the results at national and international conferences, and create a brief summary of our findings to post on this website.
What is the next step?
We completed our recruitment in December 2016 with a total of 69 autistic youth between 8-12 years of age over 3 years.
Data analysis and dissemination is currently underway.
Results
Want to know more about this project?
For more information, please feel free to contact Dr. Jonathan Weiss, Principal Investigator on the study, at jonweiss@yorku.ca.
This project is supported by the Chair in Autism Treatment and Care Research.