How to Teach a Child with Aspergers or Autism to Recognize Their Emotions

Those suffering from Asperger's syndrome and high functioning Autism often find it difficult to understand and express their emotions, or to understand the emotions of others. The emotional world may be confusing or even overwhelming for one suffering with Aspergers or Autism, and may take years of work for them to become comfortable. My purpose for writing this article is to give parents a great tool for teaching their child with Asperger's syndrome or Autism how to recognize and label emotions.

Materials Needed: For this exercise, you will need an empty photo album, a Polaroid camera, a video camera, and a television.

Identifying And Labeling Emotions in Photographs: Using a Polaroid camera, take photos of the child displaying any natural occurring emotion, positive or negative. After taking the picture, or after the child is calm enough to work with you, show him/her the picture and ask him/her to label the emotion. A great tool the child can use to strengthen their emotional vocabulary is a list of emotions. After the child labels the picture, have him/her tape the photo into the album and then label the picture with the correct emotion.

Identifying and Labeling Nonverbal clues using Photographs: Using the photo album, ask the child to look for the nonverbal clues in his/her facial expression or body language that helped him/her label which emotion was being expressed. Have the child label the photograph with the nonverbal clues that he/she finds.

Using Role-Play to Identify and label emotions as well as nonverbal clues: Role-playing is a great tool to help a child with Aspergers or Autism learn how to recognize emotions in themselves as well as others. Start by working one on one with the child. Take turns doing role-play, and guessing at each other's emotions. Freeze half way through a role-playing turn to point out facial expression, tone of voice, and nonverbal clues. A mirror may be very helpful when practicing this exercise.

Using Video to identify and label emotions as well as nonverbal clues: Videotape the child displaying any natural occurring emotion throughout the day. Show the tape to the child, and freeze when any noticeable emotion is shown. Help the child label the emotions, as well as any nonverbal clues. The same list used to label the photographs can be to help the child label the emotions shown in the video.

If you found this article helpful, you may also benefit from:

How to Teach Someone with Aspergers or Autism to Recognize Their Emotions - Part One