Well-written fiction gave me templates in "language" I could understand. To make character emotions really hit home, authors will usually describe the same one from several different angles: here is what happened to character X, here is something the character's face is doing, here is how character X feels, here is what X is dwelling on about the situation, here is how X behaves. I read extremely fast, so absorbing lots of decent books let me build up pretty good libraries of correlations between such things; then I could guess-and-check with this narrowed search space in the real world.
From my understanding, people on the autism spectrum have difficulty reading people's emotions and general social cues. I'm curious how these people develop these skills and what one can do to improve them. I ask this as a matter of personal interest; while I am somewhat neurotypical, I feel this is an area where I am very lacking.
(Sidenote: would this be considered an appropriate used of the discussion section?)