Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.
Today's article highlights another reason why it's so difficult for autistic people to fully read and understand emotional and social cues: they're super situational. A seemingly warm and friendly smile might simply be a professionally-mandated nicety. A laughing sound might, on closer inspection of the person's face, actually be tears. And perhaps most glaringly: a tantrum thrown by a small child on a grocery store's floor, might actually be a meltdown in response to loud noises, flickering lights, or other environmental stressors. Neurotypical people tend to get that last one wrong at least as much as neurodiverse people... probably more.
This, of course, explains why it's not enough to simply teach autistic people what a facial expression usually means. Not that our curricula are well advanced in that regard either, really. As a rule, when we teach facial expressions, I've only seen the basic ones: anger, disgust, happiness, fear, and perhaps surprise. In reality, people can display a little of one, a little of the other. People also lie with their faces and body language, which makes the task of reading them accurately even harder.
Proper social cue training, then, would need to incorporate practice both reading complex body language and theory of mind practice. Basically, a person needs to be able to size up a situation, and then be able to put themselves in a neurotypical person's shoes. Taking that information and adding it to the body language and facial expressions yields the final picture. This would, naturally, not be a very simple matter to put together.
I have, over time, managed to develop and hone the ability to do these things in tandem. In doing so, I accidentally gave myself an anxiety disorder. It would be good if I could find a way to teach how to do what I do, but without the anxiety disorder. I'm just not really certain as to the best way to do that. Then, too, I'm hardly flawless in my reading skills, so I might not even be the best choice to make this sort of training material. Reading situations and people is very much an art, not a science, and it's hard to convey the gist in generalities.
If someone could do it, though, I feel like a resource like it would be extremely useful... and not just to autistic people. Despite reading social cues being as natural as breathing to neurotypical people, they still study books on the subject to become better actors, salespeople, managers, or other people-intensive jobs. Having an autistic perspective would probably be very instructive.
(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)
This, of course, explains why it's not enough to simply teach autistic people what a facial expression usually means. Not that our curricula are well advanced in that regard either, really. As a rule, when we teach facial expressions, I've only seen the basic ones: anger, disgust, happiness, fear, and perhaps surprise. In reality, people can display a little of one, a little of the other. People also lie with their faces and body language, which makes the task of reading them accurately even harder.
Proper social cue training, then, would need to incorporate practice both reading complex body language and theory of mind practice. Basically, a person needs to be able to size up a situation, and then be able to put themselves in a neurotypical person's shoes. Taking that information and adding it to the body language and facial expressions yields the final picture. This would, naturally, not be a very simple matter to put together.
I have, over time, managed to develop and hone the ability to do these things in tandem. In doing so, I accidentally gave myself an anxiety disorder. It would be good if I could find a way to teach how to do what I do, but without the anxiety disorder. I'm just not really certain as to the best way to do that. Then, too, I'm hardly flawless in my reading skills, so I might not even be the best choice to make this sort of training material. Reading situations and people is very much an art, not a science, and it's hard to convey the gist in generalities.
If someone could do it, though, I feel like a resource like it would be extremely useful... and not just to autistic people. Despite reading social cues being as natural as breathing to neurotypical people, they still study books on the subject to become better actors, salespeople, managers, or other people-intensive jobs. Having an autistic perspective would probably be very instructive.
(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)
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