Serious game the Emotion Detectives helps to improve social–emotional skills of children with neurodevelopmental disorders

Children with neurodevelopmental disorders often have social–emotional difficulties. Serious games can be used to support their social–emotional learning. This study investigated if 6–10-year-old children with autism spectrum condition, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and developmental language disorder would improve their emotion discrimination skills by playing a serious game. Intervention (n = 30) and control groups (n = 20), comprising children with neurodevelopmental disorders, and a group of typically developing (TD) age peers (n = 106), completed six emotion discrimination tasks. ABA research design was applied in this study. Prior to the game intervention, children with neurodevelopmental disorders were significantly delayed in relation to their TD age peers in all tasks. After playing the game for two months, the children in the intervention group had significantly improved their emotion discrimination skills in four tasks, whereas the control group had significantly advanced in only one task without practice. Intervention gains were maintained at the one-month follow-up. Parents reported that the children in the intervention group somewhat improved their emotion recognition and behavioural skills in daily life in comparison to the control group. Implications for practice are discussed.

Practitioner notes

What is already known about this topic

• Children with neurodevelopmental disorders often exhibit various social–emotional symptoms.
• Within the field of social–emotional learning, many serious games have a narrow focus on specific skills, and they often only provide possibilities for observing target behaviours, not actual skill training.
• There are mixed results on the efficacy of game-based interventions targeted at improving social–emotional skills.

What this paper adds

• The Emotion Detectives game used in this study offers a well-designed learning environment that provides adaptive learning and feedback systems.
• The participating children's social–emotional skills were assessed with versatile methods and via triangulation.
• Intervention with the Emotion Detectives game helped to decrease some emotion and behavioural symptoms of the players.

Implications for practice

• This study provides information about the efficacy of a web-based game that is freely available for supporting children's social–emotional learning.
• Improvements in emotion discrimination and recognition, as well as behavioural skills, can be gained by playing serious games.
• For optimal intervention outcomes, multimodal training should be utilized in serious games targeting social–emotional learning.