British social workers helping autistic children are to be given a helping hand by an animated DVD that helps teach facial expressions and emotions.

Research shows that people with autism often struggle to identify and understand feelings, and also to look others in the eye. Difficulty in relating to other human emotions is also a common symptom of autism.

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University said: “We’ve got to somehow find a way to get autistic children to overcome their fear of looking at people’s faces so that they can start learning about how expressions arise.”

The DVD, entitled the Transporters, consists of a series of simple cartoons featuring human faces grafted on to animated trains.

Trials have shown that after four weeks of watching the DVD, many of the children taking part were able to identify human emotions in the same way as other children.

The DVD is now being sent out free to 30,000 families.

Autism affects one per cent of the population and, of those, 80 per cent are male. It is now widely understood to be a gene disorder.

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