DVD of the Month:

Exploring Feelings: Cognitive Behaviour Therapy to Manage Anxiety, Sadness, and Anger
People with autism and Asperger’s syndrome frequently have difficulty understanding the emotions of themselves and others, which can lead to feelings of anger, anxiety and depression. In this presentation, Dr. Tony Attwood teaches how we can implement cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) to help people logically understand their emotional triggers and effectively cope with and their control emotions.

This 3 hour DVD is divided into three chapters:

1. Chapter 1: Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and the Assessment of Anxiety, Depression and Anger
2. Chapter 2: Demystifying Emotion: Affective Education and Cognitive Restructuring
3. Chapter 3: Creating an Emotional Management Toolbox

Other DVDs with Dr. Tony Attwood include the following:

The Incredible 5-Point Scale: Assisting students in understanding social interactions and controlling their emotional responses.

In this DVD, the authors present the 5-point scale as a cognitive approach to increasing emotional control, social understanding and self-regulation. Through discussion and examples we see how elusive concepts can become concrete and visual using this approach.

The 5-point scale can be used in social skill groups, with whole classes, across ages and with almost any situation. Simply, the steps to intervention include:

• Defining the behaviour/emotion,
• Writing a story at the student’s level and sharing it on a one-to-one basis
• Breaking the concept or emotion into 5 levels- defining each level
• Discussing, from the student’s perspective, how it looks and feels at each levell
• Helping the student determine what to do to reduce his/her level
• Using the scale to alleviate a problem in context and teaching the student how to self-rate

The authors describe how an anxiety curve can be used to increase perspective taking, outlining the role of the adult at each level and presenting key points for successful intervention.

This 22 minute DVD is available through Amazon (www.amazon.ca) and accompanies the book “The Incredible 5-Point Scale, Assisting students with autism spectrum disorders in understanding social interactions and controlling their emotional responses (Dunn Buron and Curtis, 2003).