Facial Expressions, etc.

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Okay. So here's the deal. I have an essay for English due Tuesday, it has to be 500 to 750 words, and it also has to be on a conflict I have overcome. The largest conflict that came to my mind was understanding facial expressions and other nonverbal communication.

I guess what I am trying to get at here is; how do you perceive facial expressions? Do you notice them but you don't know what they mean? Do you not notice them at all? Or are you somewhere in the middle?

Any input would be greatly appreciated. If anyone would like to know how I perceive them just ask.

Though I have taught myself how to be better at 'seeing' facial expressions--by studying people in public, and on TV and in films--there are still difficulties. I am quite good now at recognising "happy" facial expressions. But I am still quite bad at noticing neutral or "unhappy" faces. By neutral I guess I mean "subtle", such as the expressions of contentment, relaxation, boredom, or expressions involving slight movements or positions of the facial muscles, smaller nuances. I have to really concentrate if I want to perceive these on a person's face. Most of the time, unless someone is using an explicit and unmistakable facial expression (pure happiness is not hard to mistake, for example) they tend to just look pissed off to me.

I think I could pinpoint almost any facial expression if I had enough time to look at it, but in most situations that's no possible. I think that's where most of the difficulty comes from, my "delayed" recognition of what's happening on somebody's face.

It's like when you're standing at the side of the road and a car zooms past, but you don't recognise it. You just catch a glimpse of it: its colour, the shape of its bumper, the tint of its windows, the sound of the exhaust. Then you construct and image in your head, running through possible car models, narrowing the list down. You finally figure it out just as the car passes over the horizon.

Thanks for your response. It's only been in the last few years that I could even recognize facial expressions. Even now, I can only accurately identify Happy, Sad and Angry, everything in between is confusing.

The reason why I posted this thread is to see exactly how similar other aspies experiences are to my own in regards to facial expression recognition.

Understanding facial expressions requires one to look at the other person, and I don't always do that, or if I do, it's briefly unless it's someone I see often. Whatever I pick up is probably rudimentary. I often miss things that are negative or unfavorable. I have to be careful with whether I am seeing what's there, or whether I am seeing what I want to see.

One of the big monkeywrenches in all this is that people will deliberately appear nice and friendly to people they don't like, or pretend to be interested in conversations that bore them, and then get angry when they've listened for too long. It's like the level has shifted, and an honest neutral response from me is perceived as negative. Positive becomes neutral, neutral becomes negative, negative becomes dangerously hostile.

I think what I do is imagine how the muscles in my face will feel if I try to imitate the expression I see. The imagined feeling of the muscle tension in my face then connects to a recognized emotion in my brain.

Hello everyone. I don't know if I have AS or not, but I found it odd that to me most of those expressions were what I would call "indeterminate", that is to say "in between" expressions, I wonder if the test is purposely ambiguous, or if I do not read facial expressions very well?

I scored 43%


I may try some other tests, I've never noticed not being able to read expressions before.

I can recognize most facial expressions (happy, angry, sadness, fear ect.) at will, it's a combination of how a persons mouth, eyes, and the overall skin around their face looks. How I do it or how I've learned to do it, I don't know, it's probably a combination of logical interpretation combined with how I would look if I were feeling the same thing, so I guess you could call it a combination of logic and emotion/instinct, or connecting my emotional brain with my logical brain. However because I can't read a person's thoughts (who can?), I can't say what they may be thinking but I can infer usually with numerous conclusions with each likelyhood having an equal probability unless the person tells me exactly what they're thinking. That and the person might be very good at faking (Mask wearing) which may completely fool me.

I'm ok with recognizing facial expressions too but have always been confused by micro-expressions (which indicate real emotions rather than the social mask), apparently you're not meant to be able to register them but I see them clearly and then the social mask expression which is usually diametrically opposed quickly covers it. Confused the hell out of me that did.

The face is the most 'under control' part of an NTs body language vocabulary, they don't often let their true feelings show on it (apart from the micro-expression) but there are plenty of places they and we have less control over.