Helpfulness of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) for the Autistic Population: Towards the Development of Evidence-Based Framework for the Adaptation of CBT using an Affective Pedagogical Agent

There is growing evidence to suggest that cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can be beneficial to people diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), many of whom suffer from multiple comorbidities. People with ASD often do not respond well to CBT though. It is acknowledged that CBT requires adaptations to accommodate experienced socio-communication and neuropsychological impairments, but there is little evidence on how best to adapt CBT to optimise treatment outcomes for people with ASD. This paper proposes an affect-aware chatbot-based intervention in the form of an animated pedagogical as a means to inform the development of the effective and acceptable adaption of CBT to meet specific needs of autistic populations in the classroom.