Challenges in Emotion Understanding

The challenges our children with ASD have with emotional understanding are that they don't understand rules of social interaction, challenges with generalizing information and predicting social behavior. This process can be confusing and unsuccessful and can lead to teasing or bullying from peers. Social acceptance is a basic desire. A child with ASD displays deficits in understanding how their behavior effects others. Unfortunately, all these negative experiences can create loneliness and some of these children show an increased risk for developing clinical depression in adulthood. (Miller-Kuhaneck)

Children with ASD also have impairments with facial processing. Children with autism exhibit impairments with a variety of facial processing tasks including visual scanning, memory of faces, and affect recognition. It is believed that individuals with autism process facial information differently than the typical population. Keller and Zach, 1993 revealed that lack of early eye contact, even in the 1st month of infancy, can lead to maladaptive relationships. Gaze direction signals interest and provides essential information about other's emotional states. (George, Conty, 2008)

Facial processing and emotional processing are inter-related because a child receives visual information from the face and body in order to appropriately process emotional information. For example, if a typically developing child was smiling but told his friend (child with ASD) to get away the child with ASD could easily misinterpret the information if he was unable to process facial information. He may perceive this as a mean comment and react on that feeling. In turn, this could create tension in a peer relationship. Due to the poor interpretation of social signals a child is challenged to respond appropriately.