Customer Reviews

Mind Reading: The Interactice Guide to Emotions, Version 1.3 with Game Zone, Learning Center, and Library

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My son has Aspergers syndrome. He did this program a few years ago when he was 6 or 7 years old.
I was just looking this program up today and saw that it has had only one review here and it was so lowly rated. I feel I need to say something to at least balance the view.
The program is substantial and is of quite decent quality. I really don't agree that it's poor actors doing poor acting. I think, for the most part, the acting was very good.
Does it teach autistic children to read emotions? That's a harder question. Can a software ever teach kids on the autism spectrum emotions?
I think what the software taught me was that my son was actually A LOT more capable of looking at a face and detect emotions, at least in a relatively non-dynamic situation, such watching a video clip of people. He surprised me by correctly identifying many more "advanced" emotions, such as jealousy, hesitation, dismay, etc.
I think where the software went wrong, or really, went too ambitious, is that it eventually (at higher levels) involved too many emotions, many of them very subtle, and increasingly subjective depending on your personal judgment. That's just too much for its targeted audience. You also realize how hard it is to "teach" higher level emotions.
The software also included many voice clips that will teach kids to gauge emotions by the tone of voice. That's another nice surprise I had. My son was very good at detecting the emotions in the voices, more than he could by facial/body clues.
So at least this software showed that many of our ASD children don't have a hardware deficit that disables them from learning about emotions. We may have to look deeper to see why them don't learn in real life.
I think the software made my son at least more aware of all the emotions going on with people. Is he a capable face reader now? No. He would still ask me, "mom why are you so mad?" when I'm simply tired.
My son enjoyed the software. I did too. It is quite expensive so if you do want it, it would be much better to share it with some other parents. As once your are done with it, you probably won't use it again.
I honestly think quality-wise it's a solid program. Evidently a lot of people have put a lot of efforts into making it.
I know there are more people who are trying to design new software that would increase social skills of ASD children. To get it to be really effective will be a huge challenge. But you never know.