'''Article:''' An Android for Enhancing Social Skills and Emotion Recognition in People With Autism by Giovanni Pioggia, Member, IEEE, Roberta Igliozzi, Marcello Ferro, Arti Ahluwalia, Filippo Muratori, and Danilo De Rossi

'''Introduction to paper:'''

This paper introduced a human-looking robot head called FACE. It can make 6 different expressions. Some activities they can do with children and FACE are to ask the child to: (1) match FACE's expression with another picture from a list of expressive faces (2) verbally explain the emotion FACE is expressing, or (3) choose a facial expression that would suit a social situation or emotion. They involved a child with ASD, and a normal developing child, in such activities, and watched their heart rates. They plan on furthering their researching, using FACE.

'''Application to personal research:'''

I think that training someone with ASD to identify another person's (and/or to express their own) emotional state through facial expressions is a surface solution. A more complete solution would be to help the person with ASD to understand and empathize with others. Instead of showing a picture and saying, “this person is happy,” the therapist could identify the child's feelings and show a picture of a facial expression that matches it and say something like, “you are happy, he's happy just like you, and he makes this face when he's happy.” I don't know how well this will apply to TiLAR research, unless we decide to build a human-looking robot head. We CAN do something with an avatar, to start.

'''Questions:'''

• How well do children with ASD understand their own emotions?
• Is it JUST the subtle facial cues that make it hard for autistic people to identify other's emotions? Or does mind-blindness also factor in, making it hard for someone with ASD to empathize with someone else's emotions even when they know what emotions that person is trying to convey?

'''Additional notes from paper:'''

• Mind-blindness is another way of referring to “Theory of Mind” (the inability to see things from anyone's perspective but your own)
• “basic emotion understanding can be taught”

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