Children and Teen's Ability to Detect Emotions in Others - How it Happens and Why it Matters

Emotion recognition can be thought of as the ability to identify and understand emotions in other people.  This skill has been referred to by some researchers as ‘cognitive empathy’ (as contrasted with ‘affective’ empathy – with the latter being the ability ‘feel’ or relate to emotions experienced by others).  We might also contrast ‘cognitive empathy’ or ‘emotion recognition’ with the concept of ‘emotional awareness’ (and there is variation in how all these terms are used) – which has often been used to refer to person’s ability to notice and understand their own emotions.  Finally, both emotion recognition and emotional awareness are of course precursors to the more complex skills often referred to of emotion regulation - effectively managing and responding to emotions (in ourselves or others).

I’ve been reading a great deal about the first concept of emotion recognition in particular in children over the last few weeks.  There is a sizeable, complex, overlapping and long historied literature about how kids/teens develop emotion recognition skills, what might be linked with challenges in this area and what can be done about it.  Given the size of the literature, what follows is not a comprehensive review (even its current length has me (non-judgmentally!) anticipating much scanning from most readers!) but I have tried to pull out some key points which might be a helpful orientation for those of us as clinicians working with children and young people finding this challenging.

1. Emotion Classification Systems

I found it helpful to do a quick reread of the literature to remind myself of one of the basic concepts in this field, i.e. what are the different types of emotions anyway - and how are they classified?  As it turns out, this is an old as the hills question:  attempts to classify emotions go back to the 17th century at least - the philosopher Descartes weighed in at one point and proposed 6 basic emotions of wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy and sadness.  Jumping ahead to one of the earliest psychological theories of emotion classification –is ‘Basic Emotion Theory’, proposed by Paul Ekman in the 60’s.  This theory identified happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust – as the set universally recognized across cultures.   There have been many more studies since that time however which suggest humans across cultures can identify many more emotions than 6.  For example, one recent review suggests we can report and differentiate between at least 27 emotions – and in case you are interested, these are as follows:  admiration, adoration, aesthetic appreciation, amusement, anger, anxiety, awe, awkwardness, boredom, calmness, confusion, craving, disgust, empathic pain,  entrancement, excitement, fear, horror, interest, joy, nostalgia,  relief, romance, sadness, satisfaction, sexual desire, and surprise.  Still other models of emotions (e.g. sometimes these models are called “emotion wheels” or ‘dimensional models of affect’) identify potential hundreds of different emotions by factoring in intensity/level of arousal, valence and their differing impacts on thoughts and behaviours. 

2.  How do people identify emotions in others?

It seems that the process by which we identify emotions in others is complex and multifaceted.  Studies suggest that humans consider a range of stimuli in this process –including facial expressions (which seems to me to be the largest topic of research in this area), body language (including posture, and body movements) and tone of voice (pitch, volume, speed). 

Side point: an area which has been the focus of much interest in AI researchers and took me down quite the reading rabbit hole - is the fact AI can quite accurately interpret emotion from human’s tone of voice.  The implications left my mind boggled – are we ready for therapist robots to provide us with inflections we might miss?

Anyway, back to less potentially job losing content: as well as the use of peoples’ face/body/tone of voice to recognize emotions in others – humans also use something researchers refer to as ‘contextual clues’.  These clues might be information gleaned from the background environment, scene information, surrounding faces and bodies, etc. – for instance, seeing people gathering around an ambulance, or seeing a present on someone’s lap or a swinging fist coming in someone’s direction.  As people learn about possible situational triggers for emotions through the accumulation of life experience, they are then more able to take in contextual clues around them, compare them to the information they know about possible triggers – and use this information in combination with the cues from someone’s face/voice/body – to help them know what someone else is feeling. 

It is no wonder therefore that brain imaging suggests that identifying emotions seems to involve many parts of the brain – and although it can be done in milliseconds, is actually a very complex process.

3. How and when do children develop the skills of identifying emotions in others

Some of my most enjoyable reading in this area has been about infant development of emotions and as usual, I’ve been captivated by learning about the abilities infants seem to have in this area.  By 7 to 8 months of age, it seems babies can discriminate between different facial expressions.  Children start being able to then describe these facial expressions - using emotional words at approximately two to three years of age.  Furthermore there seem to be reliable patterns in which emotions are recognized - happiness is recognised and labelled first, and most reliably - and then then anger and sadness.  Of the basic facial emotions, surprise or fear is recognised last.    

The ability to recognize basic human emotions (fear, happiness, sadness and anger) from facial expression alone reaches adult levels by mid childhood (pretty impressive for a 10-year-old given most other psychological and communication skills don’t reach adult levels until much later).

However, being able to identify more complex and less intense emotions from facial expressions – and being able to identify emotions when facial expressions are ambiguous – and therefore we must use non facial cues (e.g. vocal, body language AND contextual cues) takes much longer to develop.  While children will start at least trying to use these other cues from 8 or 9 onwards, their ability to do this quickly and effectively slowly develops over time.  Also being able to (at least quickly) recognize the presence of mixed emotions and be able to recognize changeability in emotions also develops more slowly - and all of these more advanced skills may not reach adult like levels until late adolescence (or some studies suggest - even young adulthood –those of you at home or working with 18 year olds who sometimes seem to miss life’s important bits and pieces – will be nodding your head in agreement).

Another side note just in case you are interested – there are a wide range of  tools which have been used to assess the level of emotional recognition skills in children – I came across around 15 or so of them which appear to have been well validated (i.e., The child emotion facial expression set, the assessment of Children’s emotional skills, the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy, the emotion matching task, the test of emotion comprehension).  Most of these assessment tools ask children and young people to identify emotions from facial expressions (videos or pictures), interpreting emotional cues from vocal tones and body language (video), and understanding emotions in various social contexts through either pictures, videos or vignettes.  Some of them use software type interface, whereas others were pen and paper (using photos).

4.  Difficulties in Developing the Ability to Identify Emotions in certain groups of children/teens

As with all young people’s skills and abilities, the ability to identify emotions accurately and quickly varies a great deal between individual children/teens.   

For example, and not surprisingly, some researchers have discussed the fact that the development of emotional detection skills in children could be very closely linked with their cognitive development.  One theory which links these concepts is the Theory of Mind (ToM) approach.  This approach posits that children experience a gradual understanding that others have thoughts and emotions (sometimes called TOM skills) and that children with more difficulties with cognitive processing skills in general, also have difficulties mastering TOM skills, and therefore also have difficulty with emotion recognition.

Another area of research which is of particular interest to those of us working with children and teens with emotional and mental health challenges and neurodivergence (for short – let me abbreviate this to EMHN for the rest of this article to save on words) is the linking of these difficulties with emotion recognition difficulties.  It’s probably of no surprise to any of us that there have been many studies suggesting that children and teens with EMHN are more likely to have difficulties identifying emotions compared to children without these challenges. 

This research has been done with numerous subgroups of children/young people.  For instance, studies have shown that the following groups of children/young people - autistic children/young people, those with ODD, ADHD, depression and anxiety disorders and those young people who have experienced traumatic life situations - all make more mistakes/are slower to identify emotions in other people.

However, it is important to note that there are inconsistencies within the research.  For instance, there have also been many studies which have failed to find these differences between children and adolescents with EMHN to neurotypical/those without MH challenges.  Furthermore, some studies have found that some children/young people – specifically those with depression - might be more accurate on some occasions at identifying emotions (in particular - sad or distressed faces) than those without these challenges.

Some studies have tried to reconcile these contradictory findings by examining the specific types of deficits in processing emotions in different subtypes of children and adolescents.   Here are some key areas of research and their findings.

1. Some studies of children and teens with high levels of disruptive behaviours find these young people in particular might have difficulties with identifying sadness and anxiety in others – but not with identifying happiness – nor with identifying anger in others (although this last point is tentative). 

This finding makes sense if we think some children with particular types of behaviours (i.e. acting without empathy or care towards others) might have these challenges partly due to them simply failing to recognize or see distress in other people.  This idea is supported by other research suggesting that these kids have deficits in amygdala function - which is one of the areas of the brain suggested to be related to the detection of fear/anxiety in others.

2. A different body of research is made up of several studies which find that children or adolescents with anxiety or depressive disorders are more likely to inaccurately label neutral facial expressions as being threatening, angry, or sad.  This is consistent with the literature on people with anxiety or depressive problems having a bias towards noticing social threats more generally or a pessimism bias.

3. Other studies conducted with adolescents with autism have suggested that there were deficits only in these young people’s ability to notice complex emotions (e.g. embarrassment, pride, boredom) and not deficits in the recognition of simple emotions.

4. Other studies suggest that the variation in study results for children/teens with EMHN might be explained to the varying level of more global cognitive or attentional deficits rather than psych challenges per se.  In other words, some studies (and reviews of studies) have found that once verbal IQ or attentional skills are controlled for, differences in emotion recognition were not significant between groups of children with EMHN versus those without.

All in all, we can probably conclude that most children and young people with EMHN are more likely than average child to have emotion recognition issues, but as always, we might need to be a little cautious about being overconfident with this conclusion – and of course not assume this is the case within any individual child/teen.

How much does it matter for children?  Impact of Poor Emotion recognition difficulties

There have been numerous studies which have provided evidence for a link between poorer emotion identification in children and poorer mental health, social behaviour, ability to resolve conflict, ‘likeability’, and educational outcomes. 

For example, a 2024 meta-analysis of 700 odd studies of kids and teens found there was a significant link between internalizing disorders (although less so individual internalizing symptoms – perhaps this is to do with severity?) and emotion recognition skills.  It should be noted that the effect size was small (and decreased over the years – with later (possibly better quality?) studies finding smaller effect sizes.   

Other studies examining emotion recognition skills and social/educational function have examined children with externalizing disorders, and still other studies of children who were neurodivergent.  Findings in both these areas have suggested that independent of diagnoses - more difficulties with emotion identification were linked with poorer social and educational functioning. 

Of course, all of these studies have been correlational, so as always, we can’t conclude for sure that the difficulties with emotion identification is what caused the functional difficulties.  However, I imagine we can all think of some plausible mechanisms which support a causal link – when children and young people have difficulties in noticing emotions in others, it seems likely they will respond in ways which undermine relationships (e.g. not noticing anxiety in a peer and acting insensitively), or experience higher distress themselves (e.g. misperceiving frustration towards them instead of sadness in a parent) which then may undermine other areas of functioning.

Can anything be done about these deficits?  What are the programs used to increase Emotion Identification skills in kids – and what do they involve

Given that most of us working in this space will have dedicated some time and energy to helping kids and teens increase their emotion recognition skills, I wanted to see what the literature might tell us about the possible effectiveness of this work – does it really help for us to try to help children/teens get better at their emotion recognitions skills? 

First, there is definitely precedent for this work.  There are many programs aiming to increase emotion identification in children or young people which have been evaluated in the literature.  These interventions have often been developed for children with conduct disorders, autism or developmental delays.  In order to get an idea of what these programs actually looked like, I scanned some the papers for descriptions of these programs, and here are some of the components which appear to be most commonly included in these programs:

-          The child/young person is usually presented with videos, images, avatars or pictures and are asked to identify emotions (or emotion triggers), and given feedback (or game like rewards) to help their performance.  

-          Often (but not always) the programs give explicit training in decoding facial expressions (look at eyebrows, mouth shapes – upward eyebrow means surprise etc.). 

-          Some of these programs also get children/teens to mimic facial expressions.

-          Some programs also train children in potential contextual clues by getting them to identify typical situations which trigger these emotions in themselves and others).  They might be asked to draw upon examples in their own life, or to imagine scenarios and then given corrective and additional feedback about other potential triggers for emotions.

However, as well as these specific programs which explicitly trained emotion recognition, there have been many more (probably hundreds) of programs and approaches which target a broad range of emotional related skills – i.e. not also emotional awareness, emotional regulation strategies, and helpful emotional responding. For example, and here are just a few named programs to give you a flavour of these - the Westmead Feelings program Programs, PATHS, RULER, The Incredible Years, Zones of Regulation, Second Step, MindUP, and the Westmead Feelings Program.  Of course, even ‘CBT’ protocols for young people usually include intervention components which at least indirectly targets abilities to recognize emotions in self and others

There is also the group of parent directed programs which explicitly aim to help children better deal with emotions, for example the Tuning into kids/teens programs which help parents to talk about and encourage emotional expression in children/young people.

Are programs to increase emotion recognition skills effective?

As would be predicted for any papers who managed to get published in peer reviewed journals, most studies (although not every single one) I read reported that their particular program was effective in improving the group’s emotional recognition skills.  Many studies also reported finding simultaneous improvements in the children’s social or emotional skills more generally and also a decrease in various problematic symptoms.

Of course the usual caveats we would usually apply when reading any psych intervention studies also apply here: let’s cite these together as a mantra – ie ‘not all children improve’, ‘effects are modest’, ‘few placebo controlled studies’, and ‘no long term follow-up’.

Take aways for clinicians:  How to improve emotion recognition and teens in children for practitioners in private practice?

1. Being aware of emotion recognition skills as being one potential causal contributing factors to difficulties – and ask about it:

It is probably, in the first instance, given the research in this area for kids and teens with EMHN, just simply continuing to remind ourselves that emotion recognition difficulties may be part of the picture in contributing to the difficulties they might be experiencing.

We could do a formal assessment of emotion recognition skills for children/teens we see using a validated instrument of course – but we can also at least just include some questions about this as part of our assessment process.  For example, this might simply be as follows:

For older children and teens:

How often do you notice emotions in others?  How skilled do you think you are at understanding what other people are thinking and feeling?

For younger kids:

Some skills are really good feeling finders, and some kids are still learning.  A feeling finder is someone who can tell what feelings other people are having – like whether they are happy, sad, mad or worried.  How do you think you go at noticing other people’s feelings?

For parents/caregivers:

Have you noticed any problems that your YP has with identifying other people’s emotions – compared to others of their age?  Do you think this impacts on their difficulties?

2. Identifying specific goals within emotion recognition difficulties

The improvement of emotion recognition in general is a helpful goal for many kids – but it so broad that we could spend hours of time on it in therapy – time which we don’t always have when working with children with a range of challenges in community settings. 

Furthermore, the research above reminds us that not all kids and young people with EMHN will definitely have difficulties in these areas – or certainly not with all emotions/levels of emotional intensity – so just working on this broadly and with all kids/teens is unnecessary. 

Therefore, we need to try to identify specific – and the most pressing - needs within emotion recognition difficulties.  There are likely a range of ways of doing this.  My approach to doing this is to consider the most problematic symptoms (regardless of diagnosis) a young person is experiencing and (using research to guide me as to some hypotheses) to ask questions to try to determine not only whether emotion recognition problems are contributing to that problem – but which type of emotion recognition skill improvement in particular might be helpful. 

The following examples might be helpful.

For children who struggle with frequently feeling frustrated by their peers / experiencing peer conflict we might ask:

When you are feeling frustrated by your friends/or when you have an argument – do you think you find it difficult to know how other people are feeling? 

For example, do you think you can tell when someone is feeling hurt, worried, sad, left out or jealous? 

Have you ever thought someone was angry and then found out later that they were not angry, but actually were feeling worried?

For children who appear to have problematic low levels of empathy or compassion, we might ask:

When you are around your friends – do you think you find it difficult to know how they are feeling? 

For example, do you think you can tell when someone is feeling hurt, worried, sad, left out or jealous?  Or do you not notice when this happens?

Have you ever found out later that someone was worried or frustrated about something, but you didn’t realise at the time?

For children/teens with social anxiety problems we might ask:

When you are feeling anxious  – are you thinking that people are feeling angry or frustrated with you – or that people are feeling offended by something you’ve done?

Have you ever found out later that they were not angry at all?

For teens experiencing frequent conflict with or feel hurt by parents/caregivers we might ask:

When you are feeling frustrated/having arguments with your parents – do you ever think they are feeling disappointed with you, when in fact they are not feeling like that at all?  Do you think you are good at noticing when your parents are feeling hurt/sadness/fear themselves?  Or is it hard to tell?  Do you think having some difficulties knowing how your parents are feeling makes things hard for you at times?

For children/teens with low mood

When you are feeling sad and are thinking about or around other people – do you think they are feeling disappointed with you, when in fact you have found out later, they were not feeling like that at all?  Or is this not a problem for you?

If parents/caregivers are involved in therapy, we would obviously be asking them similar questions about their observations of their child/young person’s skills and abilities in this area too.

3. Providing psycho-ed about potential benefits of improving emo recognition skills (while addressing shame/guilt)

If we do decide improving emotion recognition skills of some kind might be a valuable intervention component for a young person – like any intervention - we would then usually provide psychoeducation about this component to them and their families and get their feedback before we begin. 

A caution:  my experience is that providing psychoeducation about emotional recognition can sometimes make kids feel criticized or defensive because done poorly (and I’m sure I’ve been guilty of this at times) it can hint at the ‘you need to be more caring’ or ‘more understanding’ of others message (especially if they’ve already received this message from adults in the past). 

Therefore, it’s important to be really careful about providing psychoeducation about this topic – in particular making sure we minimise any shame/blame and sense of being demanding.  There are a number of ways to do this –I do it by emphasising the potential positive outcomes for all humans of emotion recognition, rather than it being something, this child/teen in particular needs to do because of some deficit within themselves. 

For example:

Older kids/teens

Scientists and psychologists think that improving our skills at recognizing different types of emotions in others can be really helpful.  If we can be a bit quicker at understanding what our friends and family are feeling, it can help us know what to say, reduce arguments and to get along better and have more fun together – that might be at school, or at sport or jobs or other places. It can also make it easier to talk about our own feelings.

Younger kids

Being a super powerful feeling finder means being really good at quickly working out how other people feel.  This can help us know what to do and help us have good friends. 

4. Exercises and activities to improve emotion recognition

Once we have identified specific goals and provided psychoeducation about this topic, we can then go on to use exercises and activities to help improve emotion recognition. 

There are possibly five different types of emotion recognition activities with different goals, and which of these we might pick will depend on the age and stage of the child. 
.

a) Exercises to identify and understanding emotions

If we are working with preschoolers, and or working with children with relatively significant verbal IQ or attentional deficits, we may need to start with very basic emo recognition skills such as being able to understand the differences between the basic emotions such as fear/worry, anger/frustration, sadness and happiness – and to be able to identify facial expressions for each of these.

There are a number of online programs which might assist with this goal, many of them are free (google “feeling games kids”).  There are also numerous commercially available games, emoji charts, books and pictures. 

We can also practice in therapy/classrooms with children by asking them to identify emotions on our faces and to replicate these themselves (potentially using video or mirrors). 

Giving feedback and correction is likely to be an important part of this process.

However, as outlined above, while it is easy for us as therapists (and therefore tempting!) to do these types of games which tend to focus on improving emotion recognition skills generally - as outlined above we usually should be trying to quickly move on to focusing on more specific emotion recognition difficulties – those which are which are most problematic for the child and therefore might have the most therapeutic benefit. 

For example, we might hypothesize that a child’s ability to recognize happiness and fear is not particularly problematic nor getting in the way of functioning - however their difficulties recognizing sadness in others is leading to difficulties acting in empathic ways.

In this specific case, although we might do some general emotion recognition activities to warm up, our focus might be on improving speed and ability to recognize sadness in their peers.  We might talk about being a ‘sad spotter’ and role play several situations using different faces/voices in which they must judge whether someone is sad or not.  And then homework activities might be doing this at home (e.g. sad spotter goals for the week – 1 per day – from TV, friends, family, characters etc.)

b) Understanding of more complex emotions

If we are working with primary aged children (or older - or teens), working on understanding and identifying basic emotions like the above is likely to be too easy and therefore not necessary. 

Instead, we might want to assist these children or young people to understand more complex emotions and what they are (so that we can move on to – see next section – start to identify these in others).

The complex emotions we might want to help young people understand include:  shame/embarrassment, feeling overwhelmed/fatigued, feeling excluded/lonely, jealousy, guilt, resentment, vulnerability, inadequacy, helplessness, confusion, disappointment and regret.

(I’ve focussed on the negative ones here, as arguably – and I know this is a generalisation - there may be more value in many young people being better at identifying these emotions compared to getting better at identifying positive emotions)

However, there are a lot of potential complex emotions – so again, using case formulation and observation skills, we will identify difficulties with understanding which of these complex emotions is most problematic.

For example, in working with children with disruptive behaviour disorders, I’ve found that it has been helpful to focus on helping some of them to understand and identify when others are feeling negative complex emotions such as lonely, embarrassed, helpless and confused.

In working with children and adolescents with anxiety, I’ve found it helpful at times with some of them to focus on helping them understand and identify when others feel inadequate and vulnerable (as well as to understand – for these anxious young people – to notice when others are not feeling any negative emotions at all – see the next section).

Here are some sentences we might use to help children understand these complex emotions: 

It’s not too hard to notice when people are very angry, very sad, afraid or happy.  But there are some more tricky or complex emotions which are harder to spot.  Researchers seem to think that when people/kids get better at noticing these more tricky emotions in others, they tend to do better at knowing what to do.  Would you like to talk with me about this for a while?

Let’s talk about (insert emotion) as this is one which might be good for you to notice (e.g. see the following options –

Shame or embarrassment is a feeling which is a bit of a mix of sad and worried, and happens when people feel they are being negatively judged by others or that someone is not good enough.

Overwhelm or stress is a feeling when people feel really anxious or weighed down by too much around them or not being able to do things they feel they are expected to do.

Feeling left out or excluded is a kind of sadness where people feel like they don’t belong or feel like they don’t have people they feel they fit with.

Feeling inadequate or not good enough is a kind of sad feeling people have when they think they are not as good as other people.

c) Learning contextual cues and situational triggers for complex emotions so young people can identify them in others

Understanding complex emotions is only the first step, however- young people need to then be able to identify these emotions in others.  Given that it is difficult (or impossible) to do this using facial expressions, voice/body language alone, we will usually want children to get better at knowing which contextual cues are associated with these emotions.  In other words, we want them to be familiar with typical situational triggers. 

For example, we might ask: 

“Now that you understand the complex/tricky emotion of feeling excluded or or left out: What do you think are typical kinds of situations/things which might make people feel like this?

And then with prompts…

“Let’s think together – are there situations/things that make people feel like this:  at school?  online?  When playing sport/games?  At home with families?  Watching media/TV?

And providing examples from our own life….

I think I have noticed people in my life feeling left out when everyone else is talking to each other, but no-one asks them a question.  Have you noticed that?

I’m going to describe a scenario to you – can you tell me whether a person might feel X or Y?

Once children/young people can identify common triggers for whatever emotion we are working on (and we might be doing a couple at a time), we can then go on to try to help children and young people apply this skill in their home /school situation. 

Now we know the things that can set off/trigger feeling left out – let’s see if you can be a really clever feeling finder and do this yourself. Could you see if you can notice three times in the next week when someone in your life or a person in something you watch - has felt excluded or left out?  We can set up a bingo/I spy game (etc) and see how many you can find.

d) Understanding mixed emotions – i.e. emotions underlying anger (e.g. fear, embarrassment, overwhelm) and sadness (e.g. guilt, left out, shame)

Another emotion recognition skill to work on in with some young people is the ability to understand mixed emotions – and in particular understand that often a simple emotion is driven by or accompanied by a more complex emotion. 

For example, we might be wanting to help children with disruptive behaviours look at other distress underlying anger in their peers or help young people with anxiety look at identifying loneliness underlying dislike in their peers.

We might say something like:

Often tricky emotions hide underneath more simple emotions and are harder to spot.

(We might use visuals to help explain this – i.e. draw the classic ‘iceberg picture’ on whiteboard/paper etc.).

Let’s see if we can think about the kinds of emotions which might hide underneath anger?  Jealous, left out etc.

As always, we then would brainstorm activities to help young people do this in situations which have been problematic for them in the past.

e) Understanding neutral emotions – i.e. not over-identifying anger/dislike and frustration in others

The final skill we might be helping children and young people with is the ability to perceive neutral (or low intensity) emotions when they have a problematic tendency to assume others are experiencing negative emotions (or a tendency to assume others are experiencing high levels of negative emotions when in fact they are lower level).

I’ve found it useful to help children/teens who struggle in this area to use a scale to think about the intensity of emotions and to be able to identify lower numbers on the scale – rather than trying to get them to assume they are not experiencing anger/dislike at all.

For example:

I know that you feel really upset when your brain tells you that someone is angry at you, that makes you worried.  Let’s think about a scale from 0 to 10 – where 0 is (not mad at all) to 10 (very angry).  How can you tell if they are a 1 rather than a 5? Or a 2 rather than an 8?

I know that you feel really worried when your brain tells you that someone doesn’t like you.  Let’s think about a scale from 0 to 10 – 0 means they don’t like you at all, 5 means they don’t really have any feelings about you, and 10 means they really like you.  How can you tell the difference between someone being a 0 versus a 5.

The end

If you made it this far, I hope that this article has prompted you to think about how you work with children and young people improve their emotion recognition skills.  I talk with lots of psychologists in supervision about this issue and I know that many professionals are doing great work in this area.  I love hearing about the creative ways they work and especially love hearing about the targeting of particular difficulties.  Of course, it takes a little more effort to go beyond the – ‘let’s look at emoticons and see if someone is happy or mad’ game, but given the potential payoffs of children and young people improving their social functioning and mood, it’s well worth the time involved.

If you would like to learn more about supporting children to identify emotions and manage life challenges, please go to www.calmkidpro.com. Within this program, you can visit our professional’s library, which has a range of modules about supporting parents who have children with emotional health challenges. Additionally, there is a children’s library with videos, lessons and games specifically designed for 4-11 year old children, and a parent’s library with videos and articles about parenting. You can also ask questions of our child psychologists and receive a response within 48 hours. Follow the link above or click on the image to the left to find out more.