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?)
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.
I learned my social skills mostly through observation and trial and error. I'd watch other kids in school, see what kinds of body language they used in specific social and emotional contexts, and try to figure out how other people reacted. Ditto for tones of voice and word choice. I also spent a lot of time mentally mapping out social relationships between my peers in as much detail as I could and tracking them over time, but I don't think that part yielded too much in the way of useful skills or information.
Whenever I thought I had some small piece of the puzzle, I'd find a context in which I could try it out, fail horribly, try to figure out what I did wrong, and try again. Once I'd realized that the only common element in all my social failures was me, it took me maybe 2 years to hit a level of basic competence, with gains coming slower after that.
I also benefited from bouncing ideas off of a therapist on a regular basis, though I suspect any sympathetic adult would have been about as helpful; the most useful part was being forced to clarify my thinking in order to coherently explain it to someone else. And having a low-pressure test environment didn't hurt, either.
A couple disclaimers:
Hope that helps.
It does somewhat, and I appreciate your experiences regardless because they are interesting data.
Personally, I have enough experience and innate skill that I am fine with the hard competencies (those social skills required to blend in, without which one really stands out). What I'm hoping to improve upon are those soft competencies that fill in the gaps between being able to handle social situations and being an empathic, social individual.
If you aren't willing to burn social capital there is a danger that you may be subject to positive test bias. So probably you should experiment in ways that you expect to make you do worse. If you're good at the coarse stuff and just want to make adjustments to the fine stuff, then this isn't much of a loss.
As an example of positive test bias, you might lump together two negative emotions as meaning "stay away," while in fact one of them requests help. If you always stay away, it's hard to learn this mistake. WrongBot's project is difficult because it mixes measurement of other people with intervention. Emotions, or at least facial expressions, are pretty simple and you probably could learn to label them from a book.
Lots of autistic children get training by, for example, studying cards that show people with different facial expressions and by playing "social detective" games in which an adult asks the child to figure out what a person is likely feeling in a given situation.
In the future there might be wearable machines that surreptitiously examines faces and bodies of nearby people and transmits an analysis to the machine's wearer. PUAs would likely drive the market for these machines.
I wonder if there is any freely available database of facial pictures linked to specific emotions. It would be pretty simple for someone to make a "guess that emotion" web game.
Actually, something like this exists:
Apparently, people with high-functioning autism or Aspergers do much worse than control subjects.
ETA: I took the test myself and scored below normal:
Your score: 20
A typical score is in the range 22-30. If you scored over 30, you are very accurate at decoding a person's facial expressions around their eyes. A score under 22 indicates you find this quite difficult
I did, indeed, find the test extremely difficult. I usually look at the mouth more than the eyes when trying to read faces...
I wonder whether the 'right answers' are what the subject of the photograph was actually feeling, what an expert intended the photograph to represent, or what most people respond.
I wonder that too.
Some of the pictures of women look like they could be movie stars or models. The "fantasizing" eyes look more like what you'll see on the cover of a fashion magazine than like anything I've ever seen in real life.
Holy crap, I just scored 33. I guess all that hard, bitter experience paid off.
Edit: I am a bit surprised to read about how hard other people found it. The options tended to have quite a predictable multiple-choice structure: two obviously implausible answers and two plausible ones. #21, for example, doesn't have the tension to be either confused or panicked. Embarrassment is plausible, but she doesn't look coy enough.
For the record, I am nowhere near this adept at spotting women engaged in the act of fantasising in real life. Multiple choice faces would be a great, if unrealistic, help.
That's an interesting test! I scored 28, and for most of the questions I failed, I find that the correct answers make much more sense than my initial guesses when I look back at the pictures. I find #29 the most cryptic.
Look at the direction of the gaze and the lack of eye contact. When someone is facing you but looking away, they are either thinking of something else or being avoidant. If they are being avoidant and looking down, then they are generally being submissive, possibly because they are lying.
Score of 30 btw. I had the same experience where I was able to recontextualize the pictures. It would make a great application if it had like 100 pictures.
Edit: Just a thought, would it be useful to people to have an article or something describing specific things to look for, like I have above? Sort of like an emotional taxonomy? It seems like it'd be an interesting project.
I think I used a combination of gaze/eye contact and eye shape, eg someone with very wide open eyes is probably scared or surprised, someone with narrowed eyes is concentrating/suspicious, etc.
Incidentally, my own score was 29 and none of my errors were completely implausible. This also goes a long way to explaining for me why it bothers me so much when people wear sunglasses.
would it be useful to people to have an article or something describing specific things to look for, like I have above
I think it would be great, but might be hard to include sufficient detail to be useful to people who have difficulties. Preoccupied and guilty both involve lack of eye contact but how do you describe the other differences?
Well for those two, I think there are two possible differences. Guilty people are going to be looking down more and possibly have there eyes closed a bit more.
Possible attributes off the top of my head:
eye contact
general eye direction
direction of the face
open/closed
eyebrows
head tilt (look at number 21for a great example)
wrinkled/furrowed face
Are there any more? That's definitely enough to categorize most emotions.
A few important ones
When you think about it, it's quite telling about just how expressive our eyes are when this test expects people coming out substantially below average to still pick correctly twice as frequently as if they were just guessing.
35. It felt hard, but apparently I'm better at this that I'd have thought. Really surprising how subtle this is -- modeling expression recognition would be a hell of a challenge.
I scored 31; my first reaction on seeing "A typical score is in the range 22-30" was that it they deliberately gave a lower range, so as to give a better feeling to the user (like those "Wow you matched the 'winner' profile by 98%! You should buy our product!" online tests).
But looking at comments here, and at the distribution given in the paper you linked, I guess I did get a decent score. Maybe my methodology worked better (hide the words, just look at the picture, describe the expression to myself, then pick the word that seems the closest); or all those years drawing stick-figure comics with exaggerated expressions (and iterating a lot on how to draw them right) did pay off.
I mean, I certainly don't consider myself above average in social skills :D
I was surprised to get 27; apparently I'm better at it than I thought.
One of the main hints I used was "eyes-on" vs. "eyes-off"; whether they were looking towards me or not.
The other main one was the tension in the face.
I found this extremely difficult too! Scored 21, and frankly, I was surprised to get that many.
24 here. Higher than I thought I'd get. I was distracted by how my peripheral vision was filled with the other faces. And in real life, you do get the whole face, which gives context to the eyes.
I got a 23, myself; considering that I'm a diagnosed Aspie, that's not too bad, I suppose. I can pretend to be normal fairly well, anyway; it's mostly the stuff about getting stuck in routines that trips me up nowadays.
The reproductions are terrible.
How good is your monitor? Last night I solved the test on a laptop whose greyscale color resolution isn't too great, and I also didn't notice that my browser had downsized the images. Now when I look at it on a better monitor, almost all the images seem much clearer and easier to interpret.
I got 31. Apparently I'm bad at autism.
It's a very interesting test though. The meanings of eye expressions are less context dependent than I'd have thought.
Great idea, it could have video as well. This is something that if no one has done it before could get funding.
Asperger's diagnosis here.
My advice to someone in my 17 year old self's position would be to get a stack of social psychology books and read them, along with succeedsocially.com and a few ettiquette books that explain the why as well as the what. Then find a venue in which to practice those skills, whether it be work (bar or restaurant work at best because of the continuous exposure to people) play (an interest group, like a club or society). If you choose play it must actually be fun because otherwise you will not go after a while. Something like comedy or acting would be great as would dancing or martial arts. I suspect the PUA community would be excellent training for men who already have training wheels but I have no personal experience with it, I just found the books helpful in providing me with better mental models of people.
My personal experience.
Alcohol fueled disinhibition leading to expanding the range of behaviours I was willing to try, and non-deliberate practice by doing more of the things that seemed to work and less of the things that didn't. This was one of the major things.
Other important ones;
Discovery Channel programmes on flirting gave me a base on which to build with interacting with the opposite sex in a more natural or at least more fluid and comfortable (for all concerned) way.
Working and going to university also made a huge difference. I was more reserved than was helpful before. Dealing with extroverts and non-intellectuals all day at work was really helpful un rubbing off some rough edges and university was great for dealing with a group with common interests and varied levels of social skills. You could see what worked and given that it was an SF society there was a large spread, and some of the people there had made large strides very quickly, some of whom I became good friends with and who were fonts of good advice.
So, I recently got diagnosed with autism. Because it is a spectrum that is more like a color wheel and less a straight line, we can all have different levels of each characteristic. We have all kinds of cognitive abilities at every level. Some of us want to be social but feel like aliens because we struggle to understand others' reactions to social interactions. I learned through observations and trial and error. We feel empathy, but we may not interpret the feelings the same as the person feeling them would.
So, anyway, essentially, the answer is observations. I literally took notes and did "social experiments" as I was growing up. I wasn't particularly aware of what was "mean" or "nice" and would cause the children in elementary school to become angry with each other over hearsay. The kids would never seem to ask the person they were pitted against and I would have notebooks filled with notes. People seemed to get arbitrarily angry with each other but would never tell each other why. I learned about ethics growing up and learned to ask questions that would give me more answers from their body language, time it took to answer, and gauge their reactions from either myself or a male to a male or female, etc., in high school.
Throw some trauma in there for physical, emotional, sexual abuse throughout my adolescent life and continued (up until 2yrs ago, I'm better now) on to adulthood.
Life is a series of learning experiences. If you ask enough, you get answers from their poor reactions or from their actual answers. You learn how to ask. I always ask people that are angry with me, what have I done to upset them and what could I change to avoid this in the future. When I was younger, I would trigger some issue they have and would cause them to believe I was attacking them. This causes them to activate their sympathetic nervous system and see everything as a threat.
I'm getting off topic.
Read! Research the specific hurdles that are causing you to feel held back. You know, better than any of us, what specific issues are arising. If need be, write them down. Write them down in any way you'd like. If you have the opportunity, ask people you are having problems syncing up with about what they feel the problem is. If you struggle to understand others, ask them. If they're upset with you anyway, what could it hurt (assuming this isn't an abusive/ dangerous situation, in which case please avoid these people)? Most people are taken off guard and will realize that this is a struggle and will want to help you. If how you ask angers them, ask them what you said that made them upset. If you want to move up to becoming more pleasurable, then study people that are very sociable. My friends believe that I am very sociable, but it takes a lot of energy for me because I am constantly having to go through my mental library of what certain reactions and words may mean coming from people of certain genders, ethnicities, and where they grew up (if known). You can most certainly learn from those around you as well. Learn from their successes. Learn from their mishaps. Learn by breaking down what happened into honest and realistic actions or inactions.
There is a pattern to most everything. Luckily, I excel at finding patterns (most humans are naturally good at it, they just may not notice they do it) and I can use this skill to understand the humans around me. The more information you have on human nature, whether from a posteriori, a priori, or reading/watching videos, the easier it will be to know what reactions certain people may want or need from you.
Most importantly, if you feel insecure because of some internalized past failed interactions, take a step back and ask yourself why you feel this way. Your feelings are valid, should be felt, and released in healthy ways (exercise, meditation, yoga, etc), but they should also be analysed. Do you think that the level of emotion you felt makes sense for that interaction? If not, have there been other times that you felt more emotional than need be? If so, then you may have some underlying feelings that you have not dealt with and need to face in order to progress. Whether it be with a therapist, a trusted friend, or on your own (by typing it out, writing it out, saying it outloud to a recording app or device), it needs to be let out and understood.
Asking questions is the first step to understanding and therefore mastering. There is no losing, just winning and learning, in life (taken from Nelson Mandela). This means that as long as you take time to understand what happened and implement plans to adjust, you are only ever learning, or otherwise winning. *internet hugs*
Sorry, I got carried away. I struggle to keep things concise. I hope this helps.
My hypothesis (I e-mailed Simon Baron-Cohen and he agreed) is that autistic people don't subconsciously "synchronize" with people in the same way that neurotypicals synchronize with each other. "Synchronization" seems common in the animal kingdom - this is why spinner dolphins can be extremely good at coordinating their movements together without even having to communicate at all.
So autistic people have to learn these signals very consciously, as explained in all these other posts. And conscious learning is often clumsy (which often means oscillatory convergence around a fixed point)
If I may, where did you learn these things? I am reading a book on trauma and some people with a history of trauma and abuse can lose the ability to synchronize with others and may have autistic qualities. I have a history of trauma. So, there may be some overlapping qualities. I would love to pick your brain or research. :]
Positive:
Enjoyment/Joy - smiling, lips wide and out
Interest/Excitement - eyebrows down, eyes tracking, eyes looking, closer listening
Neutral:
Surprise/Startle - eyebrows up, eyes blinking
Negative:
Anger/Rage - frowning, a clenched jaw, a red face
Disgust - the lower lip raised and protruded, head forward and down
Dissmell (reaction to bad smell) - upper lip raised, head pulled back
Distress/Anguish - crying, rhythmic sobbing, arched eyebrows, mouth lowered
Fear/Terror - a frozen stare, a pale face, coldness, sweat, erect hair
Shame/Humiliation - eyes lowered, the head down and averted, blushing
Well for those two, I think there are two possible differences. Guilty people are going to be looking down more and possibly have there eyes closed a bit more.
Possible attributes off the top of my head:
eye contact
general eye direction
direction of the face
open/closed
eyebrows
head tilt (look at number 21for a great example)
wrinkled/furrowed face
Are there any more? That's definitely enough to categorize most emotions.
A few important ones
When you think about it, it's quite telling about just how expressive our eyes are when this test expects people coming out substantially below average to still pick correctly twice as frequently as if they were just guessing.