2012 Student Contest Winning Entry
An Image-Emotion Dictionary
By Daniil Lukin, 11th grade
Ward Melville HS, NY.
Communication is a vital element of human nature, but for people with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), even simple social interaction can be very difficult. Applications developed for tablet computers facilitate communication for people with ASD, mostly by digitalizing existing unwieldy tools which aimed predominantly at using pictures of objects and actions for communication. Abstract nouns—such as fear, anger, justice, satisfaction—are essential elements of any conversation, but are particularly challenging to individuals with ASD. When it comes to the most complex aspect of interaction—sharing f ffeelings and emotions—people with autism are on their own: The task of defining emotions without the use of facial expressions (recognition of which is also hindered by autism) has not been tackled by developers. The use of specialized abstract images may be the answer.
Temple Grandin, diagnosed with severe autism at age two, learned to speak and shared with the world the way her brain functioned: “I think in pictures. Words are like a second language to me.” A 2010 study (Kunda, Goel) supported the hypothesis that Grandin isn’t a unique case. In fact, most people with autism are visual thinkers. I recently interviewed Isaac Wooten, a college student from Washington State, for my pilot study where I examine emotional expression through abstract images in individuals with ASD. “Many of my friends are surprised to find out that I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome at the age of six,” Wooten reflects. Expressing himself verbally with ease, he nevertheless possesses a visually-oriented brain and is able to share the experiences that a lower-functioning individual can’t.
Wooten discussed the distinct and well defined animated images that are representative of his emotions: “Happiness is seen as circles, patterns, looping cycles of motion, and bold, strong edges with little mix of color... Sadness is seen in grey-scale, with steep waves and diagonal lines. Spirals spinning in the background... Fear is mostly jet back. Serrated edges, zig-zags, colors look like wet paint being smeared on a white sheet.” As I continued to interview more individuals like Isaac Wooten, it appeared that although emotion-portraying images vary slightly among individuals, the descriptions share many fundamental components. This means that emotion-images seen by individuals with autism may be, to an extent, universal, and a given image may signify very similar emotions to different people.
High functioning individuals with ASD like Isaac Wooten connect the worlds of word and image. Their experiences with language and visual thinking offer an opportunity to transform communication. If volunteers with light forms of ASD contributed verbal descriptions of emotion-images, the images could be reconstructed with computer graphics and accumulated in an image-emotion dictionary. This dictionary would thus contain abstract images with emotion tags in written language (as described by the volunteers). The dictionary could easily become an app for the iPad to be used by non-verbal people with ASD to communicate their emotions to the outside world, simply by scrolling though the pictures to select which ‘feels’ the way they do at the moment.
If it is possible to create a native (and thus comfortable) communication medium on the emotional level, it is more than just immediately gratifying: The benefits of the rudimentary dictionary will allow non-verbal people with autism to communicate a handful of basic emotions with ease, but it won’t stop there. Studies and developments will continue expanding to other abstract concepts. The first step is recognizing the potential of abstract visual communication, which introduces revolutionary methods which may be developed to permit people with autism of all ages to carry a pocket translator which would adapt our convoluted, verbally-abstract world to their own.
Works Cited
Grandin, Temple. "Autism and Visual Thought." Thinking in Pictures: And Other
Reports from My Life with Autism. New York: Vintage, 1996. 1. Print.
Kunda, Maithilee, and Ashok K. Goel. "Thinking in Pictures as a Cognitive Account of Autism." Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 41.9 (2011): 1157-177. Print.