Do others misread your emotions?

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Had a bit of a problem during a voc eval a few weeks ago; basically I'd had four hours of sleep, and after six hours of intense testing, I was told the cab to pick me up was going to be late, so I had kind of a meltdown... I tipped over the chair I'd been sitting on and went to the bathroom to collect myself. I didn't yell or even break down crying; it was pretty minor as meltdowns go.

On the evaluation report, it describes me as "enraged"... I wasn't even angry... I was just overloaded, the feeling you get when everything seems too loud, too bright, too rough, when a breeze on your skin feels like sandpaper... Anyway, who could I have gotten angry at? Nobody'd done anything wrong.

I've got the tl;dr version of the incident up on my blog, if anybody's interested, but that's the gist of it.

There are other things they describe as much more hostile than I meant them--"yelling" that I was getting distracted during one test, for example (they were in the next room--I was shouting so they'd hear me, not because I was actually angry).

Any idea why these people are misreading my signals so badly? Is there an easy solution, or is it just going to be this way and I'll have to basically tell people "I'm not mad at you" all the time?

I have had the SAME problem!

Many people seem to interpret me as being angry even when I'm feeling nothing at all. It's a little confusing.

This happens to me alot too. Sometimes people come up to me and ask if I'm ok when I am actually feeling quite happy. When I ask why they say that I looked upset. Also at school when I have have got into trouble teachers have always described me as being more angry/uspet then I really was.

Sometimes when I am really angry nobody even notices, except people who know me very well.

I guess NT's can't read us just like we can't read them

at school a major problem I had was I came across as quite threatening, it didn't help I was an avid rugby player back then (Prop).

I never intended to threaten anyone, just when I got upset or agitated apparently I came across like that.

All the time. It never ends.

Yesterday I was with a group of friends, just listening to their conversation, and my other half took me aside to ask what was wrong because I seemed really upset... not at all, I was very happy just listening and occasionally chiming in.

I'm always asked what's wrong, about 10 times every day - I think my neutral face must look upset or angry or something.

People always assume I"m more upset than I am about things, too. It makes me really conscious of trying to look happy, but then they think I'm upset and trying to hide being upset by feigning 'happy'. You can't win.

Exactly; we may not be any good at NT-reading, but they're no good at Aspie-reading, either. Like I said--communication gap. Like speaking a different language, or at least having a very thick accent.

Yeah, even Ma often misreads my facial expression and often tells not to get annoyed so easily.

I get "What the f-ck is wrong" at work all the time. Then again, it's not because they misread, it's just that they are over-reacting to whatever I said. Even happens when I look at people.

LostInEmulation-exactly!

I'm glad someone brought this up, because many people including my family think I'm a psycho about to blow for the same reasons. It's bloody annoying.

I wonder whether I just don't tamp down emotions properly; like maybe an NT will feel REALLY angry and just show a little bit of it, or feel a little angry and not show anything at all; so an Aspie's "a little angry" looks a lot like an NT's "REALLY angry" because he's not holding back any. I know our emotional expression differs; some of us under-act emotions ('flat affect' I think), so it couldn't be true of everyone. Some, though, maybe. I had a similar incident a few months back with a psychiatrist who saw me at the end of a long day and insisted I had GAD when what I was feeling was just a tired/mildly anxious combination coming from a day of testing and an unfamiliar environment. I think he mis-read my anxiety as stronger than it was. (He also said "poor insight", which is really another word for "patient disagrees with psychiatrist", and which every other person who's interviewed me literally laughs at.)

Yeah, you've got a responsibility to work on anything that could hurt somebody, that's pretty obvious. You might use autism as an excuse to explain why you said something offensive before you could figure out it WAS offensive; but autism isn't any excuse for not trying to figure out how to predict said offensiveness and take steps to prevent it happening again.

Anyway, most of the things you do because of Asperger's are neutral, not hurting anybody, not hurting you. I'll eat my hat before I stop stimming because people think it's weird. (Eating my hat would be weird, too, of course.)

Yes, people misread my emotions and intentions all the time. I think the problem is that our behavior and body language are different from the way it is for neurotypicals, but they don't know how to read into it any other way than their own. So when we do something that a neurotypical would do when they are angry, they assume that we are angry because we send the signals they recognize as anger, while to us those signals may mean something completely different.

The most common thing that gets misunderstood with me is when I'm thinking deeply about something or fantasizing, people think I'm sad, depressed or that something is wrong, while I might really be enjoying myself. Being quiet, absent-minded and with no expressions on my face gets interpreted as a sign that something is wrong.

People tend to think that I'm upset or nervous when I'm feeling perfectly fine.