Happy New Year!!! I hope that this monthly installment of our newsletter finds you enjoying the holiday season and getting ready to celebrate the start of a new year!
We are excited to have both of our two therapy groups (our general group with some video game making and our rock climbing therapy group) starting the winter sequence on Wednesday, January 8th!
SIGN UPS ARE HAPPENING NOW!
This issue of our newsletter features an article regarding how to help children to recognize the emotions that they experience as well as when others are having an emotional reaction. At Quest, we are proud to provide an innovative treatment program through our therapeutic summer camp and school year therapy groups that have been proven to reduce problem behaviors not only at camp, but in school, at home, and in everyday life. We hope that our newsletter will be a source of support and applicable information to improve the lives of the amazing children and families in our community.
Sincerely,
Jodie Knott, Ph.D.
Director and Licensed Psychologist
Quest Therapeutic Camps of Southern California
Helping Children to Recognize Emotions in Themselves and Others
Learning to recognize one's own emotions as well as the emotions of others is a critical skill needed for children and adults to have healthy and positive interactions with others. While the ability to be able to read facial expressions is typically a well developed, natural skills for people, it is very common for children with attention and social difficulties to have severe struggles in this area. Typically by preschool, children can make and understand all of the 410 different facial expressions. "An early skill that has been found to be important for the development of additional social ability is the ability to understand and recognize facial expressions appropriately. These expressions allow the child to understand the other's mood reaction to their behavior and adapt accordingly." [1] In general, children on the autism spectrum have been found to struggle significantly since they typically don't give eye contact and instead look at someone's mouth. This is concerning since approximately 80% of human facial expressions is communicated through the eyes. [2] In addition, only 7% of emotional meaning is expressed with the use of words, while 55% is conveyed through facial expression, body language, and gestures. [3] Luckily, children can be taught how to recognize facial expressions and emotions in themselves and others.
There are several resources that can be helpful to help children with recognizing facial expressions and emotions. A couple of these programs include:
1. "Let's Face It!"--A face recognition program that teaches facial recognition and emotion recognition in 20 hours. The program is a free download from the University of Victoria Brain and Cognition Lab and the Yale Child Study Center. Information is available at: http://web.uvic.ca/. [4]
2. Attainment's Getting the Message, Learning to Read Facial Expressions Program--Pat Crissey provides a solid program with many ways to assess aspects of facial recognition as well as providing a curriculum for how to approach teachable skills and connected practice opportunities.
At Quest, we have also worked with our children by teaching many skills related to face recognition and emotion recognition. We do this in several ways. Regarding facial recognition, one key area of our program is trying to make our conversations with our campers explicit and go over with them what benefits they can get out of seeking out more information from facial cues and body language. We don't just tell our children to give us good eye contact, but we discuss with them the type of information that they should be seeking out through the eye contact that they are giving. In addition, often parents or teachers will assume that children will understand the adult's emotional experience since their emotions are being conveyed through their facial expressions. Since the children we work with are prone to struggles in this area we instead are very clear in our language. For example: I might say to our campers "Right now I am very frustrated. You can see this by looking at my face. Pay attention to the shape of my eyebrows and how my hands are on my hips. Those are both clues that I am frustrated right now." We often will try to help the children we work with to recognize their own cues as well. An example of this would be to say to a child, "Right now it looks like you are upset. I can see that your voice is lower, that your shoulders are slumped, and your mouth is turned down. These are all cues to me that you might be upset."
For emotional conversations, our campers also often respond best when we give multiple choice options regarding how they are feeling versus an open ended question. In several instances we work to help our children to rate their various emotions from happy, sad, excited, nervous, etc. on a 1 to 5 scale. Often we will see less behavioral difficulties when we are successfully able to help our children recognize when they are getting upset and then using appropriate coping strategies. At Quest, many of our children become proficient at labeling the intensity of an emotion that they are experiencing and then using corresponding coping strategies until they have decreased to a 1 or a 2 on our 5 point scale. We also routinely use our number scale on days with emotionally intensive field trips such as a trip to a local amusement park when we ask our campers how excited and also how nervous they are and then discuss how we can often feel more than one emotion at a time.
While it takes time to focus on facial expressions and the recognition of emotions it is valuable since this is a key skill for success. The good news is is that there are good resources out there to help teach your children these skills.
[1] Semrud-Clickman, M (2007). Social competence in children. New York, NY: Springer, p. 76. as cited in a presentation on Social Difficulties of Learning, Attentional and Autism Spectrum Disorders by Dr. Kevin Blake, 2013. www.drkevinblake.com.
[2] Dr. Kevin Blake, presentation on Social Difficulties of Learning, Attentional and Autism Spectrum Disorders, 2013. www.drkevinblake.com.
[3] Mehrabian, 1987, as cited in Getting the Message, learning to read facial expressions by Pat Crissey, 2007, USA.
[4] Dr. Kevin Blake, presentation on Social Difficulties of Learning, Attentional and Autism Spectrum Disorders, 2013. www.drkevinblake.com.
