Age-Tailored Social Robot Interventions for Emotion Understanding in Autistic Children

Abstract

Emotional understanding is a key component of Theory of Mind (ToM), yet many autistic children struggle with recognizing and interpreting emotions. At the same time, they tend to enjoy interacting with robots, which are perceived as predictable and less socially complex. This pilot study investigates the use of age-tailored socially assistive robots in a rehabilitation setting to support emotion comprehension and enhance social engagement in autistic children. A novel approach was employed, combining social stories with multimodal expressive cues to train multiple components of emotional understanding within a single session. Six verbally able children without higher support needs participated in 4-8 individual sessions of 30 minutes over two months. Activities were differentiated by developmental stage: younger children worked with explicit, context-based emotional scenarios, while older children engaged with implicit emotional cues embedded in social narratives. Preliminary results suggest improved recognition of emotions, increased conversations with adults, and empathetic responses, suggesting the therapeutic potential of age-sensitive robot interaction design.