RCT of FaceSay's Gazing and Face Recognition games, w/ 60+ 4yo Neurotypical Head Start Students

Trista Perez, a grad student at UAB, successfully defended her master's thesis, "Social Skills Training in a Head Start Population" this month.  The was a randomized controlled trial with 60+ neurotypical preschool children.  The group that played FaceSay's "Bandaid Clinic" game showed statistically significant improvements in the Benton Face Recognition test.   o

"Children’s ability to recognize faces varied significantly based on group assignment nF(2,73) = 7.62, p < .001, with an effect size of 0.17. (Power=0.98) nChildren playing FaceSay™ showed higher scores in a test of face recognition following the 12 week intervention"

Just as interesting is what was not seen.   In this HeadStart study, only two of the FaceSay games, "Amazing Gazing" and "Bandaid Clinic" were used.  The old version of the "Follow the Face" game, at the time, was thought to be too difficult for the kids and was omitted.  "Follow the Face" is the FaceSay game that teaches not emotions explicitly, but an awareness of the physical antecedents of emotions, the facial movements.  Interestingly, none of the children in this study showed the improvement shown by the higher functioning autistic children in the first study on the Emotion Recognition test.  The difference is that the children in the first study played all three FaceSay games, including the "Follow the Face" game.