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Affective Social Quest 135

Figure 16.1. Elements of the Interface.

2. The System

ASQ displays an animated show and offers pedagogical picture cues – the
face of the plush dwarf doll, the emotion word, and the Mayer-Johnson stan-
dard icon – as well as an online guide that provides audio prompts to encourage
appropriate response behavior from the child. The task was to have the sys-
tem act as an ever-patient teacher. This led to a design focused on modeling
antecedent interventions used in operant behavior conditioning. In essence,
ASQ represents an automated discrete trial intervention tool used in behavior
modification for teaching emotion recognition.
The system has multiple possibilities for interaction. In the default case,
the system starts with a video clip displaying a scene with a primary emotion
(antecedent) for the child to identify and match with the appropriate doll (tar-
get behavior). After a short clip plays, ASQ returns to a location in the clip
and freezes on the image frame that reinforces the emotion that the child is
prompted to select. The child is then prompted to indicate which emotion she
recognizes in the clip, or frame - i.e., to select the appropriate doll matching
that expression. To motivate interaction, the doll interface – the only input
device to the system – creates a playful interaction for the child.
The practitioner can, using various windows, customize each interaction for
each child. First, the practitioner can choose which video clips the child will
be shown. These clips are arranged based on content (e.g. Cinderella), source
(e.g. Animation), complexity (low-med-high difficulty of recognizing the emo-
tion), duration (clip length), and emotion (happy, angry, sad, surprised). Prac-
titioners may wish to focus on only a couple emotions early on, or may wish to
avoid certain types of content depending on the idiosyncrasies of a particular
child. The child’s interface screen can be configured to include one or all of
the following picture aids: Mayer-Johnson standardized icons representing the