Autism & Emotional Regulation

Autistic kids (and adults) have difficulty managing their emotions, particularly with recognising and understanding feelings and expressing their emotions appropriately. The ability to self-regulate. Autistic individuals usually have intense feelings that often overwhelm them – and this is known as “intense world” theory i.e. that autistic people feel too much and sense too much.

Non-autistics (NA's) enjoy a higher level emotional competence, which allows them to manage their interactions with others more effectively - they find ways to cope and adjust their behaviour to better suit the current situation.

Autistic children are usually quite impulsive, which eliminates the ability to think things through and see the consequences of their actions. They don’t recognise the physical reactions of emotions such as fear or excitement, as being signs of emotion, and so they miss vital clues that would enable them to regulate their feelings.

Children with Autism often use mimicry in situations as a coping strategy, so they may utter phrases they’ve heard on TV or repeat something you’ve said. They develop a “script” to use in a variety of situations – mostly when dealing with conflict or confrontation. This is why sometimes what they say doesn’t seem to fit the situation.

Autistic children / adults often aren’t able to generalize any emotional competence skills they do gain to adapt them to new circumstances. This means their judgement of certain situations is incorrect – they can appear to lack common sense. Non-Autistic (NA) people use feelings to help them interpret rules and make exceptions, whereas Autistic kids / adults are black and white in their thinking.

Being fact driven, Autistics tend to focus on facts and overlook their feelings, because this makes better sense to them. Emotions help NA’s shape their morals and value systems; therefore not interpreting emotions correctly can negatively influence the principles your Autistic child develops. So it’s important to take the time to “debrief” your Autistic child/adult after any major emotional incident to ensure they’ve drawn the correct conclusions.

It’s important to continue to expand your Autistic childs emotional vocabulary. Children usually begin with three basic emotions – happy, sad, and angry. Work at increasing your child’s emotional vocabulary to include excited, surprised, worried, proud, embarrassed, content, peaceful and a feeling of anticipation etc. Use magazines to find pictures and label them. Ensure you explain that emotions look ‘different’ on different people, and find as many different examples of an emotion as you can to highlight this.

Concentrate your efforts to increase your Autistic child’s emotional vocabulary on members of your family first– Mum, Dad and siblings, as these relationships are the most important in your child’s life, and understanding each other’s emotions more accurately will help to create a calmer environment for your whole family. You may like to take photos of each other displaying emotions and label them. Show variations of facial expression for each emotion and note their body language as well. You may like to make a game, using a mirror to capture facial expressions.

Once you’ve practised recognising emotions from facial expressions, enhance this knowledge by linking emotions to situations. E.g. “What would embarrass you?”, “What would make you proud?” etc.

Complex emotional concepts, such as conflicting emotions, are much more difficult to understand and explain to children with Autism. After focussing on simple emotions for months and/or years you should introduce a scenario containing conflicting emotions and discuss at length, once a week. However, the black and white thinking of children with Autism may never allow them the dexterity to deal with emotionally complex situations such as this, on their own.

Working to maintain and increase your Autistic child’s emotional competence is perhaps the most rewarding and worthwhile task you will undertake, in your journey on his/her path to an independent, happy life. After all, the key to successful relationships of all kinds lies in emotional competence.

?Nelle Frances 2005