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 explains a bit of the complexity of emotional recognition for autistic people. Assume the autistic person doesn't have the innate ability to read faces, the way typically-developing people usually do.
First, everyone's face is different. Second, there are 16,384 different ways a human face can express emotions. Third, a lot of the people you need to read aren't familiar to you. Fourth, everyone expects you to be able to do this flawlessly.
I thought it was kind of interesting, and heartening, that there were only 35 categories of emotional expression. That doesn't, you understand, make it much less complicated to read any given person's face. But it does mean that teaching materials for each of the 35 categories would actually be an option.
This article got me thinking about how I read faces, and it occurs to me that I tend to consider the situation a person is in first, and then try to piece together their expression from that starting point. So if someone looks angry when their situation should be calming and happy, I'm going to be very confused and not quite believe my eyes until I can figure out why they look angry.
That's backwards of most people, from what I can tell. I think most people read expressions first and then consider circumstances from there, if their train of thought goes that far. Looking at the stock image on the article, with the eight pictures of the teenage girl, I have difficulty telling the difference between the emotions in the 5th, 7th, and 8th pictures. And because it's just a stock photo, and thus has minimal context, I have literally no idea what the minute differences in head tilt, eye crinkling, and... whatever else normal people see in those pictures to differentiate them.
I really have no idea. When it comes to reading expressions, I really need context for anything more subtle than, "angry, sad, happy, or disgusted." I took a test online once, and it told me that while I don't have face blindness, but I do have great difficulty with faces.
This was not news to me. Just a few days ago I met a guy, and saw him again later at another lecture. He recognized me easily (I'm sure the blue hair helped), but because he was wearing a hat and because my eyes and brain don't work together well, I didn't recognize him at all. I couldn't tell if he was offended, but my guess is yes. Most people are. It gives me a great deal of anxiety.
(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.)
First, everyone's face is different. Second, there are 16,384 different ways a human face can express emotions. Third, a lot of the people you need to read aren't familiar to you. Fourth, everyone expects you to be able to do this flawlessly.
I thought it was kind of interesting, and heartening, that there were only 35 categories of emotional expression. That doesn't, you understand, make it much less complicated to read any given person's face. But it does mean that teaching materials for each of the 35 categories would actually be an option.
This article got me thinking about how I read faces, and it occurs to me that I tend to consider the situation a person is in first, and then try to piece together their expression from that starting point. So if someone looks angry when their situation should be calming and happy, I'm going to be very confused and not quite believe my eyes until I can figure out why they look angry.
That's backwards of most people, from what I can tell. I think most people read expressions first and then consider circumstances from there, if their train of thought goes that far. Looking at the stock image on the article, with the eight pictures of the teenage girl, I have difficulty telling the difference between the emotions in the 5th, 7th, and 8th pictures. And because it's just a stock photo, and thus has minimal context, I have literally no idea what the minute differences in head tilt, eye crinkling, and... whatever else normal people see in those pictures to differentiate them.
I really have no idea. When it comes to reading expressions, I really need context for anything more subtle than, "angry, sad, happy, or disgusted." I took a test online once, and it told me that while I don't have face blindness, but I do have great difficulty with faces.
This was not news to me. Just a few days ago I met a guy, and saw him again later at another lecture. He recognized me easily (I'm sure the blue hair helped), but because he was wearing a hat and because my eyes and brain don't work together well, I didn't recognize him at all. I couldn't tell if he was offended, but my guess is yes. Most people are. It gives me a great deal of anxiety.
(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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