Kaitlyn Rendeiro, Janet Preis, Ed.D.

Can You Feel the Music?: A Pilot Study

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The study examines the research question, "are young children with autism able to recognize and label emotions depicted in music, and do these skills correlate to their abilities when presented with visual stimuli alone?"  Specifically, this study examines the similarities and differences for receptively and expressively identifying five emotions (i.e., happy, sad, angry, afraid, surprised) across three different stimuli: (a) line drawings, (b) photographs, and (c) music. Research Design: A cross-sectional design will be used as this study is collecting data on identification of emotions one time only from a variety of participants. A cross-sectional design provides a snapshot of the variables included in the study, at one particular point in time and may reveal how those variables are represented in a cross-section of young children with autism across age groups.