Understanding other’s emotions in varying contexts is critical for being able to socialize and build relationships with others. Contextually relevant emotion identification is a clear deficit area for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and results in difficulties building positive social relationships. The present study examined the effectiveness of using multiple exemplar instruction to teach pre-school children with ASD to recognize emotions across varying contexts. Video-based scenarios were used with paired emotional responses to differentiate situations of context. The results of the study demonstrated an increase in participants ability to label contexts and emotions of video-based scenarios. Participants also generalized the skill to untrained video scenarios. These findings support the use of multiple exemplar instruction as an effective strategy to teach children to label other’s emotions. Successful learning of such skills will further the field’s approach in its effective teaching modalities of social skill acquisition, and help children engage in positive peer relationships at an early age.
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