Autism

A Unique Sensory, Emotional, and Social Development

Social Learning

    A good part of our social learning is to read and learn to imitate facial expressions. This is a slow process that takes work in two major areas. First, we must understand the emotions that generate the expressions. Then, we must learn to express each emotion as it is express in our society. So, what happens if a person senses things differently? Sensing is at the root of feeling. So, unique sensory combinations produce unique emotional development.

Having unique emotions, autistic people do not necessarily relate to the way others show emotions. Therefore, as time passes, autistic people tend to become more and more different from the norm.

This can be counteracted by specifically teaching them how to respond to stimuli. For instance, you can reward a smile instead of a scream as the autistic child’s reaction when some one enters the room. Note that this means you have to create the situation of people entering the room with high frequency. Then, you have to scold the screaming behavior and reward the smiles. Initially, you may have to instruct the child to smile, smile yourself, have others smile, etc. until you get the autistic child to smile.

Teaching the autistic child to respond in an acceptable and positive way to each situation requires working on that response to that situation.

Since there are so many responses and so many situations, the teaching becomes intense and burdensome. However, not teaching the child correctly will be more burdensome in the long term.