teach2talk’s™ Social Skills! series helps teach children appropriate social behaviors through the use of targeted video modeling. Volume 3 of our Social Skills! series, Emotions, Feelings and Empathy, focuses on skills that are difficult to master for many children: recognizing the way others typically demonstrate their internal emotions and feelings, and understanding empathy, which is the capacity to recognize or understand another's state of mind or emotion, or “put oneself into another’s shoes.”

This two–disk title divides instruction into an introductory program and an advanced program, both contained in the same case. The introductory, first disk focuses identifying how other people show a variety of core emotions, feelings and moods to the outside world, including happy, sad, angry, excited, nervous, frustrated, surprised, scared, hungry, confused, shy, disappointed and embarrassed among others. The second, more advanced, disk helps teach children how to identify situations where other children are experiencing these emotions, how to appropriately express these feelings themselves, and introduces the concept of empathy with suggestions about how to help or relate to a friend feeling a certain way.

This video is appropriate for children of all ages and developmental levels, whether as an introduction to the concepts of identifying emotions or as more advanced instruction into proper expression of one’s own emotions and empathizing with others. Emotions, Feelings, and Empathy can also be used as an effective teaching tool by showing children a scenario, and then asking the children to immediately model appropriate behaviors through role–playing.

teach2talk™ Co-Founder Sarah Clifford Scheflen, M.S., CCC-SLP, Speech Language Pathologist:
Many of the children I work with have difficulty understanding emotions and empathy. It’s difficult to teach someone what it means to feel a certain way, or even to recognize when others are feeling that way. When I started using video modeling to teach these concepts, it was a real breakthrough; I find that visually demonstrating scenarios with real children in a controlled setting and then immediately have a dialog about how the children felt and why, is very effective. I can then broaden the discussion to include situations where the child felt those emotions, and how they can react next time.

teach2talk™ Co-Founder Jenny McCarthy, Mom:
It was really hard for me to help Evan understand how to really express himself. For a long time, I didn’t know when Evan was hungry or confused, for example, because he wouldn’t tell me – even after he had the right words. And then the next challenge was helping him be more empathetic! When we had the idea to teach these skills through video modeling, his world really opened up. For example, I cried when he told me, “Mom, my friend is crying because someone pushed him, that makes me sad.” And then I laughed when he told me recently “Mom, I’m shy of girls!”