Photographs and pictures of people freak me out

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It seems as though people in photographs are staring at me. I know they are not really doing so, I am not psychotic, yet when there is a picture frame of a person or people on a table, and if I am sitting at that table, doing whatever, I have to flip it down or turn it around so that it isnt facing me.

It makes me very uncomfortable.

I also have this problem with dolls and stuffed animals, I have a sense that my bears are "alive" in their own way. If they are mistreated or hurt I get very upset. I was actually bullied for this when I was a child.

Do you get freaked out by inanimate objects "staring" at you? Why do you think that is?

I was like that with my stuffed frog when I was little if he got "hurt" I would hurt myself in equal measure for example if when i was carrying him he hit his head on a wall I would have to hit my head on a wall. if I dug my fingers into his side too tightly I would have to pinch my own side.
but nah I don't get the photograph thing, I'm sure other do though

Well, we are all different but the common thing is the emotional connection to objects. Do you still have the stuffed frog? Have you ever connected emotionally with it?

My Mum had a china frog in the bathroom when I was living at home and everytime I had a bath I put the hand towel over it sometimes I forgot to take the hand towel off she thought I was mad.
I didn't want it looking at me when I was in the bath.

This is why I dislike photograph avatars. Something about the human face just frightens me even though I know I have little to fear.

I think I can relate to this regarding my computer. For some illogical reason, I feel some kind of pain (somewhere between imagining the pain and actually feeling it) every time my computer has an audible collision with something. It gets annoying because it often becomes an ache in several frequently affected muscles and there is no reason for me to feel a phantom pain where there never were nerves. Perhaps autism redirects social centers toward inanimate objects or the special interests and this empathy is an over-stimulation of the mirror neurons.

If the objects aren't human faces, I've little trouble dealing with it.

that's what i was kind of saying too. there is some fear response there that i cannot articulate! i dont understand why faces freak me out, why i get afraid of things like that.


its the strangest thing!

I vaguely recall an article posted on this site about that. Apparently, we have more activity in the amygdala than is considered normal when forced to make eye contact or see a human face. This causes the odd sensation of fear. On a related note, some cultures consider it rude to maintain eye contact because it is perceived in the same way an animal perceives sustained eye contact (challenge/threat).

I always feel like the people in the pictures are staring at me. I don't like dolls either and never wanted to play with them as a child. I collect Littlest Pet Shop, with the intent to customise them. When they added Blythe dolls to the line, it irratted me so much I considered stopping collecting LPS all together. Most people don't understand and tell me I don't have to buy the dolls if I don't like them and can just keep buying the animals; but I don't want to have anything to do with a line that has people in it. Yeah, I'm weird. My neice used to have these dolls that were speicaly made to look real. I hated them. I knew they were not alive, but I felt as if they were staring at me. I would always turn them face down whenever they were in the same room as I was. Stuffed animals never bothered me. Animals that were once alive but stuffed and perserved never bothered me either. It's just people eyes I don't like. I don't even like the eyes of cartoons and paintings.

I have a weird attachment issue from childhood. Whenever we would go shopping if my mom picked up something and realized it was defective in some way (can was dented, etc.) I would cry if she put it back. We had to take the first one because I was worried about hurting its feelings. Similarly if she had already touched a second one we had to buy that too for the same reason. I would also seek out defective items that I was worried would get left behind (the bear with lopsided eyes, the Christmas tree with a big dead patch, etc.) I still struggle with this. Even though I rationally know that these items can't have feelings that I could hurt it is still incredibly hard for me to leave them behind. My husband knows about this so when he buys me a present (like a stuffed animal) he will always get the one that has something "wrong" with it.