Escape from Emotional Distress: A Curriculum Model to Enhance Self-Directed Emotion Regulation of Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

The ESCAPE curriculum model was developed to enhance emotional awareness and behavioral support for students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to help with stressful events and escape from emotional distress. The instructional phases represent an emotion regulatory process: starting with emotional and behavioral awareness, followed by deconstruction of the stressful and emotional experiences, and finally the acquisition and practice of adaptive cognitive and behavioral strategies. A total of 66 students with ASD (mean age = 13.93 years; SD = 0.93) participated in this study to evaluate ESCAPE with allocation to an experimental group (n = 28) of receiving the ESCAPE instruction and a wait-list control group (n = 38) of no implementation of the curriculum before the completion of the study. Data on students' and teachers' pretest and posttest scores on the Emotion Regulation Scale (positive outlook, emotional awareness, social support, problem-solving) were analyzed by hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) for total and subscale scores. Results showed that the experimental group made considerable progress in relation to the controls following ESCAPE instruction.