“You Feel – Emotional understanding” has been developed to support children and young people (users) to identify and understand emotions in others and themselves.

The app facilitates the development of skills in emotional understanding through exposure to a range of different emotional states in cartoons, emojis and photographs.

Stages have been developed to provide a progressive intervention meaning it can be delivered to users at different developmental stages. Each stage has a key focus, which is briefly described below;

Stage 1 - Labelling emotions with simple language
Stage 2 – Labelling more complex emotions and expanding emotional literacy
Stage 3 – Modelling emotions – Understanding self
Stage 4 – Understanding how an emotion may sound
Stage 5 – Understanding cause and effect (Inference).

Questions in the final stage encourage users to make an inference from an observation, identify a potential cause and problem solve. These are more complex requests and may be more challenging for some users especially users with developmental delays or autism.

Guidance for staff
The app is a facilitator allowing staff to establish a user’s level of emotional understanding.
It is important for staff to discuss answers with the users and so support the development of their understanding. Some answers will be opinion-based meaning that in many cases there is no right or wrong answer.

Assessment Framework
The You Feel evidence-based assessment framework, found within the app, has been developed to allow staff to identify targets and record the development of new skills whilst working on the app. Progress and current targets can be tracked within the app for up to eight users.