RESEARCHERS at the University of Bolton have developed a groundbreaking new tool that could eventually improve the lives of autistic children and their families all over the world.

Their work will help researchers understand more about the way children, and especially autistic children, react to and process facial expressions.

The university’s Computer and Cyberpsychology Research Unit has developed a database that includes hundreds of images of cartoon and human faces — to help researchers understand more about the way children, and especially autistic children, react to and process facial expressions.

The tool is called the University of Bolton Affect Recognition Tri- Stimulus Approach, or BARTA, and contains faces portraying happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, fear and surprise.

Children with autism often struggle to read emotions from other people’s faces and some researchers think this is because they do not like looking at human faces or process them as objects rather than faces.

Recent studies have found that autistic children prefer to look at cartoon faces and process these in the same way as nonautistic people process the real thing.

Louise Lawrence is the principal inventor of the system and in the final year of her PhD at the University’s School of Health and Social Sciences.

She has worked closely with Debbie Abdel Nabi.

The BARTA system was recently unveiled at the British Psychological Society’s annual conference.

Mrs Lawrence said: “Requests have come from universities as far afield as the US and Hong Kong.

“It allows the academic community a new and comprehensive research resource that can facilitate new, innovative and pioneering research into the different ways facial expressions of affect are perceived and processed when communicated by synthetic and human faces."