Yeah, I can read facial expressions. If the corners of the mouth turn up, it's a smile. If the corners of the mouth go down and the eyebrows come together, it's a frown. Is that smile a smirk, a grin, or schadenfreude? I dunno. Is the person angry at me, glaring at me, or just concentrating on a problem? I dunno. I know what those emotions are, and have always known, but I never knew just which faces were doing which. What's worse, I didn't _know_ that I didn't know! I had no idea until the doctor gave me a photograph test with no other cues attached (no hair, no ears, no jewelry, no background, etc) just how many subtleties I was missing. I could tell that I was flunking miserably at naming emotions well before we finished, and it was a complete surprise to me, and I was about 64 years old at the time!
Later, my psychologist at the Mental Health Center did a different test on me, with six faces and six named emotions on each page, and I was supposed to match them. Perfect score! I did it with my test-taking skills, getting the easiest first and eliminating possible answers as I went. The test that diagnosed me had no suggested emotions for me to pick out and eliminate: I just had to find the right word for the picture, and couldn't.
Back when I was in college, almost fifty years ago now, one of my roommates decided that she was going to help me improve my social life, meaning "BOYS". She picked up immediately on the mechanical walk (I already knew that I was a terrible social dancer). She noticed that when I was in conversation with a group, that I was "mugging", with exaggerated, inappropriate expressions. She thought that I was trying to be a comedian. I knew that I wasn't, and thought I was just doing the same expressions as everyone else, but to a "normal person's" perception from the outside, my face looked like a comedy act. And of course, in those days practically nobody knew much of anything about Asperger's, Autism, or the difference from NTs. But I did take her word for it, and worked on serenity, or very little expression, or trying an attractive slight smile and holding it there, more or less, in a mirror. It did seem to help. I had already learned eye contact, consciously, from my very smart mother and from speech classes.
It was such a great revelation when I got almost accidentally diagnosed almost fifty years later, and started learning about Asperger's, Autism, and things like "mirror neurons". It solved so many mysteries about my life, of which Suzie's perceptions were only a few.
_________________
Asperges me, Domine