Question 5: Take Home Strategies

When working with children with ASD, keep in mind that children with ASD have a lack of understanding of emotion and decreased recognition of facial expressions.  Children with autism do not have a good ability of recognizing emotion, as discussed in my previous posts, therefore, when you use your facial expressions as rewards or praise they will not understand.  For example, when the therapist smiles when the child does a “good job” in OT, the child may not understand that this means they did a good job. This was discussed in my first post, how children with autism process emotion differently than typically developing children.  They also have difficulty reading emotion on faces and in general use a different scan pattern when looking at faces (Gautheir, Klaiman, Schultz, 2009).

As stated previously, children with autism have difficulty understanding emotion in facial expression. Teaching children to label faces of different emotion and practicing making those faces are shown to improve children’s understanding of different emotions on faces, as stated in Ryan and Charragian (2010) article.  Also, sorting different faces with different emotions on them are helpful in having the child understand emotional expression.

Having difficulty understanding emotion affects the child’s ability to make friends, sustain friendships and get a job, as stated in my first post.  Therapists need to address these needs.  If we are working on prevocational activities or socialization goals, part of what we should address should be the emotional and facial processing skills of these kids.  These skills are vital in interviewing, sustaining a job, and making and keeping friends. (http://www.emotionalprocessing.org.uk/Various%20articles/Autism.htm#Autism_and_Emotional_Processing)

Lastly, this is an area where family education is important. Parents need to understand that sometimes their child may not understand what emotion they are displaying on their face and not react appropriately. Giving the family a variety of ideas to teach these skills, as stated in my previous post, for home use, will aid greatly in helping them form relationships with their children.

This is my last question to answer on my blog. I hope everyone has learned something from reading this blog. Please post any questions that you have for me so I can address them all on my next posting…thanks!