Understanding Emotional Development of Autistic Kids
- by WONDERMOM
- Dec. 22, 2022
TYPICAL DEVELOPMENT OF EMOTIONS
There are six fundamental human emotions: Happiness, Surprise, and Sadness. Anger. Fear and revulsion. Additionally, we experience more complicated emotions such as embarrassment. Shame. Pride, Guilt, Jealousy, Joy, Trust, Curiosity, Disdain, and Anticipation.
The capacity to comprehend and express these emotions begins to emerge at birth, and by two months of age, the majority of infants can laugh and display indications of fear. By the age of one, a normally growing infant can read your facial expressions and comprehend your emotions. Most toddlers and young children begin to use words to convey their emotions, but you may see one or two tantrums when their emotions are too powerful for their words!
During childhood and adolescence, the majority of children continue to develop empathy. They also develop the ability to control their emotions and to recognize and react to the emotions of others. Adults are often adept at swiftly recognizing subtle emotional cues.
Empathy is the capacity to share and comprehend another’s emotions. Infants exhibit the first symptoms of empathy, such as crying when they hear other babies crying, while toddlers and older children will console a distressed individual.
EMOTIONS AND AUTISTIC
Children Frequently, autistic children have difficulty:
Identify emotions, facial expressions, and other emotional signals such as voice tone and body language.
Manifest and regulate their own feelings
Understand and react to the feelings of others; they may seem to lack empathy.
RECOGNISING EMOTIONS
Babies subsequently diagnosed with autism are able to recognize emotions similarly to ordinarily developing infants. However, these children acquire emotional reactions more slowly than ordinarily developing youngsters.
By ages 5-7, many autistic children can distinguish between ‘happy’ and’sad,’ but they have a more difficult time identifying nuanced emotions of fear and rage.
Autistic adolescents are not as adept as normally developing adolescents in recognizing fear, anger, surprise, and disgust by adolescence.
Many individuals continue to have difficulty identifying some emotions.
SHOWING AND UNDERSTANDING THEIR OWN EMOTIONS
Babies subsequently diagnosed with autism may express emotions similarly to normally developing infants. By school age, children with less severe autism may express their emotions similarly to normally developing youngsters, but may have difficulty articulating them. They may claim that they do not experience a certain feeling. At the same age, many children with severe autism seem to display less emotions than children with regular development.
It may seem that autistic youngsters lack emotional reactions or that their emotional responses are excessive. This is because children with autism may struggle to control their emotions. For instance, people may get very furious very fast or find it difficult to calm down after experiencing powerful emotions.
Recognizing and reacting to the emotions of others
Early on, autistic children often pay less attention to the facial expressions and emotional expressions of others. Autism makes it difficult for pre-schoolers to share attention, and they often do not utilize language to direct another person’s attention. Young autistic children seldom point out fascinating things to others or reply when others point out intriguing things to them. This is known as shared or joint attention, and its absence is one of the early indicators of autism.
Frequently, autistic children have difficulty using emotion to comprehend social relationships. They may be oblivious to the distress or anger of others. They may exhibit less care for others and be less able to console or express their feelings with others. They may misinterpret things and behave with inappropriate emotions.