Patients with autism experience severe social impairments and sluggish emotional expression. A novel form of autism treatment is now art therapy. There is, however, a dearth of research on the use of art therapy with patients who are students. This study intends to investigate the therapeutic impact of university-level art design classes on autistic patients when they are exposed to emotional interaction.

100 patients with autism were selected from a certain university and randomly divided into a blank group and an experimental group. The blank group did not use art therapy, while the experimental group used art therapy with emotional interaction and design courses. The experimental period lasts for one month. Both before and after the experiment were evaluated using the Kirschner Autism Behavior Scale (CABS).

According to the experimental findings, there were 25 patients had moderate understanding difficulties, 13 patients had mild understanding difficulties. 12 patients in the blank group who had severe emotional understanding difficulties before the experiment. In the experimental group, there were, respectively, 11, 27, and 12 patients with mild, moderate, and severe emotional comprehension difficulties. After the experiment, the number of patients with mild to moderate to severe emotional understanding difficulties increased in the blank group to 11, 27, and 12, while it grew to 19, 28, and 3 in the experimental group.

The therapy of art and design courses in universities with emotional interaction has alleviating effect on the emotional understanding disorders of patients with autism.