Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychologist and Director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, together with a team of researchers, has been given a grant from the Uk government to produce a DVD to help children with autism recognise facial expressions.
Often children with autism can find it difficult to recognise facial expressions, and therefore are unable to interpret how others are feeling. Emotions such as happiness, sadness and surprise may have little meaning for them.
Baron Cohen says “Very rule-based kids with autism get fascinated by patterns and get a lot of pleasure from repetition”. They also often enjoy vehicles, particularly those that move predictably along tracks, such as trains.
In order to help children with autism learn this important social skill the team have produced a DVD called The Transporters, featuring eight cartoon vehicles with human faces. Some of the characters include William the ferry who smiles as he carries friends across the harbour, and Jennie, the tram, who is envied by Oliver the funicular railway.
The DVD has 15 episodes focusing on a few emotions, starting with the basics such as happiness and anger and moving on to more complex feeling such as jealousy. There are quizzes at the end to reinforce what the children have been watching.
A month long evaluation of “The Transporters” has shown encouraging results. 17 children with autism and Asperger syndrome watched the DVD for 15 minutes every day for a month, whereas a control group of 17 similar children did not have access to it.
The children who watched the DVD were found to have a significan improvement in their ability to recognise emotions, with some even catching up to the ability levels expected of non-autistic children of the same age.
The funding has enabled the Centre to distribute 40,000 free copies which are suitable for children with autism up to about 8 years old.
For more detail on the original article, which appeared in the Washington Post, and information on the DVD click on to the links below:
Jane Gregory
Specialist Speech and Language Therapist
April 2009
