Uniquely Human by Barry M. Prizant

Author:Barry M. Prizant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

How Not to Teach Emotions

Too often educators think they’re teaching people with autism how to express their emotions when what they are actually teaching is how to label pictures of people expressing emotions. Using language to describe emotion is among the most abstract tasks a young child faces. It’s one thing to recognize an apple or a table and identify it; conveying how you feel or how someone else might feel is far more complex. Emotions involve both cognitive and physiological reactions. We not only feel; we reflect on how we are feeling and why. We also experience emotions in our body.

Such reactions are dynamic and intangible. But some therapists recommend attempting to teach emotions to children with autism by having them identify facial expressions in diagrams: happy, sad, excited, angry, surprised, confused. Ros Blackburn pointed out to me the problem with this approach. “For years, people tried to teach me emotions by having me label happy and frowny faces,” she said. “The only problem is that people do not look like that.” These teachers aren’t teaching emotion; they’re teaching picture recognition. And they’re certainly not teaching the child to express and understand why he is feeling a particular emotion.

A more effective approach is introducing a label—happy, silly, giddy, anxious—at the moment the person is experiencing that feeling. (For some people it’s more appropriate to make the connection between a visual image such as a photograph and the person’s feeling.) That way, he learns to express and communicate a cognitive-emotional experience, not just a facial expression. Once the person understands the emotion, he can learn categories of experiences he associates with that feeling.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.