Helping Children Understand Facial Expressions

How to Teach Autistic Children to Recognise Emotions

Apr 24, 2009

Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often have difficulty interpreting facial expressions and body language correctly.

Facial expressions, and other non-verbal gestures, convey extremely important information, such as how a person is feeling or what he or she is thinking. However, these messages can be subtle and open to interpretation, and this kind of “mind reading” is a recognised area of difficulty for individuals with ASD.

Theory of Mind

The ability to “read minds” (referred to as “theory of mind”) involves awareness that other people have thoughts and feelings inside their head, which are separate from one's own. For example, if one notices that the person to whom one is talking, starts frowning or shaking his or her head, one might infer that this person is losing interest in what is being said or disagrees in some respect. One can then react to this non-verbal message by saying or doing something that enables the conversation to continue without bad feelings.

Children with ASD find it difficult to interpret facial expressions: excitement might be mistaken for anger or fear confused with happiness. Autistic children may not realise the significance of people’s facial expressions and ignore or mis-read them. This may lead to inappropriate behaviour, conflict in social situations and difficulty sustaining friendships.

Children with ASD need to be taught, quite literally, how to interpret facial expressions. The simplest ones to start with (appropriate for a very young child) are happy and sad. This concept can be introduced with pictures, drawn or printed from clipart. The adult should point to each face in turn saying whether it is happy or sad, and model the same expression on his or her own face. For example, the adult could point to the happy picture and say “This is a happy face – look, mummy is feeling happy, too!”

Feelings Board (or Mood Board)

The happy and sad faces could be extended to become a “feelings board”, along the lines of a visual timetable, with the cut-out pictures mounted onto a piece of card. Furthermore, the feelings board could actually be incorporated into the visual timetable, as an activity that is part of the daily routine. The feelings board should start with two choices (happy and sad) for the child to select according to how he or she is feeling - the adult asks “is (child’s name) feeling happy or sad today?” and the child responds by choosing the corresponding face.

This strategy can also be used to help the child express his or her own feelings at other times, for example, if there has been some conflict or upset. This will provide a valuable means of expression which the child might not otherwise have the language skills or vocabulary to communicate.

When the child has become familiar with the happy and sad faces, and understands what they symbolise, other expressions can gradually be added to the feelings board, such as:

Feelings faces provide a simple, yet highly effective, visual strategy for helping children with ASD learn about emotions and understand the non-verbal cues that underpin social interaction. In addition to being used with visual timetables, they can be used in conjunction with Social Stories.

The copyright of the article Helping Children Understand Facial Expressions in Autistic Students is owned by Jane Kelly. Permission to republish Helping Children Understand Facial Expressions in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.