Emotional understanding deficit is one of the core symptoms in people with autism. In intervention studies of emotional understanding in people with autism, the visual communication design of emotional interactions can enable autistic people to better experience and understand the emotions of others and enhance their emotional comprehension ability.

Three autistic children in a school in Shanghai were selected, and all three children were insensitive to identifying the emotions of others. The study used the single subject method in the variable passive design, with the visual communication design as the independent variable and the facial expression recognition ability as the dependent variable. In addition, round teaching for the subject intervention was used in this study.

After 28 weeks of visual communication design based on emotional interaction, the three autistic children had different degrees of recognition of happiness, fear, anger, and sadness. The happy expressions in the image were learned by the three children first, followed by anger, and finally, two negative emotions: sadness and fear. This shows that visual design can improve the recognition ability of facial expressions by autism.

The visual communication design based on emotional interaction promotes the emotional comprehension ability of autism, making it easier for autistic children to understand and learn. This design also gives timely feedback to help autistic children understand and adjust their emotions. It can even migrate to psychological theory, social skills and other fields to improve the comprehensive development of autistic children.