By Camille GATE – M2 PEADID
“Hi everyone, welcome in psychopodcast, your podcast dealing with psychology. Today we are going to speak about social skills, more specifically about the recognition of the emotions among Adolescents with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (which I will call during this podcast ASD). In this podcast, we will define what are social skills and focus on adolescents with an ASD. And in the end, I will present a program and we’ll see a few tips on how we can work with these adolescents on learnings about emotions recognition.
- What are social skills?
When we meet someone, we first need to detect signals expressed by them, for example the tone of their voice. Then, we will interpret the meanings of the signals thanks to cognitive processes and finally we can predict someone’s intentions. These social skills arise from social cognition which is, according to Moskowitz (2004), the mental processes involved in perceiving, considering and understanding people around us. Social cognition includes what we call the theory of mind. To Premack and Woodruff (1978) this means the ability to recognise and predict mental states of others or of oneself, more specifically to recognise intentions, beliefs and emotions.
Today we will focus on one component of the theory of mind which is the treatment of other’s emotions. In fact, in our society, we are all dealing with feelings and emotions. It constitutes a social language. Thus, processing and understanding emotions of the others allows people to develop interpersonal relationships and it allows people to understand and communicate with others in a suitable way.
- Difficulties in identifying and recognising others’ emotions for individual with ASD
A deficit in cognitive empathy which corresponded to the capability to recognise others’ emotions is reported among the persons with Autisc Spectrum Disorder. We know thanks to the DSM V that deficit on socials interactions is one of the criteria to diagnose an ASD. This deficit will complexify social link and could isolate people with ASD.
Different theories exist to explain the deficit in the capability of recognizing emotions. First, ASD people used to avoid other’s gaze. Some explain that people with ASD usually make a local visual exploration of the information instead of a global exploration which leads to difficulties of recognising and understanding others’ emotions. Some studies advance that individuals with ASD don’t treat the upper part of the face – eyebrows, forehead, gaze- but they will prefer the lower parts of the face as the mouth. So, we know that they don’t make a global treatment of the face and that they might treat only the lower part of the face. This knowledge has a very important impact, especially with the apparition of the COVID because that constrains everyone, everywhere to wear mask which is hiding the lower part of our face. So, it can be a real issue to people with ASD to identify others emotions in addition of their initial difficulties.
To evaluate difficulties on emotions recognition a test based on Eckman and Friesen battery of test exist. It assesses the capability of recognising basic emotional facial expressions (sadness, surprise, anger, joy, neutral, fear, disgust) The seventy-seven (77) pictures of faces are presented. When the person recognises an emotion, she’s got 1 point. This test can be realized before and after social skills groups in order to objectify the effectiveness of a program.
- Social skills group: working on emotion recognition step by step
In this podcast we will take the example of the facial emotions training program extract from a study established in a medico social structure. The aim of this program was to train emotions learnings, social attention and the recognition of emotion expressions.
Step 1: Psychoeducation module – during one session of one hour
There is a presentation of emotions on a power point and then an explanation of the difficulties encountered by people with ASD on the recognition of emotions. The consequences of these difficulties are explained as well. It is the moment where you can explain which parts of the face are essential to make a valuable treatment of the emotion. But we really have to keep in mind that it’s important to be careful to explain all of that in a concrete manner.
Step 2: Social attention orientation and gaze module – during two sessions of one hour
These two sessions are dedicated to the training of the attentional orientation of the gaze toward faces.
During the first session adolescents are in circle and have to convey a simple oral message to their neighbour with the constraint of systematically exchanging a glance with him.
The change during the second session is that the order of the circle is not followed anymore in order to force adolescents to focus their visual attention on the transmitter. The aim was also to constrain the transmitter to direct his gaze toward a specific fellow.
Step 3: Facial emotions module – during 6 sessions of one hour
The aim of these sessions is to work on the visual treatment of the different elements of the face involved in emotions expression. The work is made for anger, joy, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust and pain. In the program of the study, a smiley was first present and then pictures of faces were presented. Each picture was accompanied with an emotional pyramid in order to estimate the severity of the expressed emotion. Arrows were drawn on faces in order to indicate areas of the face involved in the emotion. Then other pictures were used to analyse emotions by the way of the body positions and gestures. The psychologist has to help adolescents and guide them towards important elements of the face. He can use is own face as an example. And he encourages adolescents to participate and comment supports.
Be careful, at the beginning of the work it’s important for adolescents with ASD to prefer static supports rather than video supports which are more complex to analyse.
Step 4: Matching module – during one session of one hour
It’s a matching and categorization emotion task from pictures of human faces. Wrong answers are corrected by the psychologist in a benevolent way with explanations.
So, we just saw an example of program but many things can be done. For example, we can imagine a welcoming time. Before introducing the theme of the session, we can begin with the “mood of day” time during which each participant can express his feelings of the day and share it with others.
With ASD adolescents it is important to multiply visual supports, for example drawings, pictograms, pictures… and to do different activities as doing mimes, creating adolescents’ own book of emotions, drawing emotions or playing board game dealing with the subject (for example with the feelings game)
However, with ASD adolescents it essential to structure interventions and establish them in a regular and structured way.
Conclusion:
To conclude, the aim of the work on emotion recognition is to enhance strategies of adolescents with ASD. This in order to bring them to a better understanding of the functioning of neurotypical people, and more generally to bring them to a better understanding of the social environment to enable a better inclusion. Nevertheless, it is very important that the social environment, at school for exemple, stay aware of particularities of people with ASD and adjust their behaviour in order to facilitate inclusion of ASD adolescents.
It was Camille GATE for psychopodcast; Thank you for listening.”
References
American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596
Bon, L., Lesur, A., Hamel-Desbruères, A., Gaignard, D., Abadie, P., Moussaoui, E., & Baleyte, J. M. (2016). Cognition sociale et autisme: bénéfices de l’entraînement aux habiletés sociales chez des adolescents présentant un trouble du spectre de l’autisme. Revue de neuropsychologie, 8(1), 38-48.
Kruck, J., Séjourné, N., Rogé, B., & Courty, S. (2017). Étude sur l’efficacité des groupes d’habiletés sociales proposés aux enfants avec un trouble du spectre autistique. Journal de thérapie comportementale et cognitive, 27(1), 25-33.
Merceron, K., & Prouteau, A. (2013). Évaluation de la cognition sociale en langue française chez l’adulte: outils disponibles et recommandations de bonne pratique clinique. L’évolution psychiatrique, 78(1), 53-70.
Sellès, H., Pierre-Malen, J., Courty, S., & Mélan, C. (2017). Diversité des effets de l’entraînement aux habiletés sociales sur la reconnaissance des émotions chez les enfants atteints de TSA. Enfance, (4), 599-605.