A project at the Autism Research Centre, Cambridge University has helped a small group of autistic children understand more about human emotions.People with autism often struggle to identify and understand feelings, and are extremely reluctant to look at people's faces. The Centre has used specially created cartoons to help teach the youngsters about facial expressions and the underlying emotions.
Many autistic children are fascinated by trains and cars and the project capitalises on this fascination with vehicles by grafting real people's faces onto cartoons of vehicles. A DVD animation series, called The Transporters, has short 15 minute episodes each introducing the idea of new emotions, like happiness, anger, fear, kindness and pride and includes an interactive quiz, which helps the children learn about the emotions.
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