Simon Baron-Cohen's talented team announced results from a 20 student study of Transporter's, a neat DVD aimed at teaching kids emotions. 

The good news is that the autistic children were able to match the game performance of neurotypical students after just a few weeks.   Unfortunately, as with the earlier 6 student study of transporters, and with all other studies I've seen except for FaceSay, there was no measured benefit to everyday life, where it counts.

As Baron-Cohen cautions in the press release ...
"...while autistic children might be able to recognize emotions better after watching the DVD, that would not necessarily change their behavior at home or on the playground."

Unlike the FaceSay study , where parents reported students' behavior improved at home  (see slide 12), and blinded grad students measured improved behavior with other students on the playground - e.g. increased eye contact, more initiation of social interactions, and fewer negative behaviors (see slide 13) -  this Transporters study  showed improved performance only with animated characters in the game:

"Close generalisation of skills - children were asked to match animated familiar Transporters faces to situations they had not seen before. Distant generalisation to real [animated] human faces - children were asked to match animated unfamiliar faces to unfamiliar situations. "

In a spring article in the UAB Magazine, Dr. Biasini talked about the benefits of computer based interventions like FaceSay, and the encouraging gains seen in the study. 

"Also, the computer tasks performed by children in the study were brief in comparison to the time that might have been spent in social groups to achieve the same gains—we saw benefits that might have taken months to achieve in social groups."
-- UAB Magazine, Spring 2008

I hope FaceSay can be used as an "amplifier"/"accellerator" for group and person to person social work of every sort.  For example, I would bet - er, my hypothesis is - that the Gazing excercises in ABA, the "Thinking with the Eyes" sessions in Michele Garcia Winner's "Social Thinking" program and many others might see larger and/or faster gains when done in conjunction w/ FaceSay.

Dec. 2007- UAB completed a randomized controlled trial w/ over 80 4yo Neurotypical preschoolers using two of the FaceSay games - "Amazing Gazing" and "Bandaid" Clinic - as the Intervention.  The kids loved the games and saw gains in Face Recognition Skills, but not Emotion Recognition (the facial expression matching game was not part of the study).  Generalization was not measured.   Trista Perez, the Primary Investigator, successfully defended her Master's thesis related to the study.

The study supports my notion/hope that FaceSay could be used inclusively for all 4-6 yo students, to provide a benefit to a) neurotypical children (learning to follow a teacher's gaze), b) children already identified on the spectrum and maybe most importantly, to c)  children who not be identified until 2nd or 3rd grade.

The University of Alabama Birmingham announced  encouraging results of their randomized controlled trial with 49 autistic children.  Read the Press Release.