An innovative tool to get better at expressing facial emotions

Abstract

Social cognition disorders cause important social and communicative impairments in people suffering from autism or schizophrenia, as they have difficulty recognising emotions in others and expressing their own. This paper introduces the prototype of an innovative computer-based training tool as an attempt to improve the expressiveness of facial emotions in people with socio-cognitive deficits. This tool is designed so that the therapist plans training and evaluation sessions, which are composed of several stages and adapted to each patient. In some of them, the patient learns about facial expressions using pictures while in other stages he/she proves what he/she has learnt, and the system automatically evaluates the performance. The system provides the therapist with post-therapy tools to analyse the results and the performance of the patient.