Emotion recognition (ER) difficulties can lead to difficulties in social communication and relationships as well as negatively impacting wellbeing, and autistic individuals are more likely to experience ER difficulties.

Dr Zoe Reed and Dr Angela Attwood, as part of a wider team in the University of Bristol’s School of Psychological Science, have been developing a co-created toolkit to help support autistic children with ER difficulties with the aim of improving these outcomes.

In the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute project and follow on work Dr Reed examined whether a digital ER task (part of the toolkit) was beneficial in a series of online studies (moved online due to Covid-19) in the general population and autistic individuals. Read: ‘Assessing the effectiveness of online emotion recognition training in healthy volunteers’. This work was also supported by Bristol Biomedical Research Centre.

The need for this was supported by further research within Elizabeth Blackwell Institute project using existing Children of the 90s data, showing a relationship between earlier autistic traits and later ER difficulties. Read: ‘Examining the bidirectional association between emotion recognition and social autistic traits using observational and genetic analyses’.

The team have since worked with autistic children and schools to further develop the toolkit and found that engaging with the ER task over time was beneficial for supporting ER. Children enjoyed co-creating a board game as part of the toolkit. This work was funded by Welcome iTPA. And they plan to apply for further funding to finalise development of the ER toolkit. They aim to roll it out across UK schools to support autistic children with ER difficulties and facilitate communication around understanding emotions and embracing differences across children.