It's not the eyes, it's the muscles around them.

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I think that is part of the larger context, understood in a loosey-goosey, right-brain type of way.

I like your viewpoint there Karilyn. About refusing to believe that you're incapable of anything. It ties in with my view that it's important not to let a diagnosis define you. I think throughout my life (if and when I get diagnosed) I will constantly try and break the boundaries of it.

But yeah I definitely believe you can kinda get a system for working out peoples emotions. I realised after a while that I could perform well in that test if I scientifically analysed the eye movements and positions. I had to think really hard and relate the pictures to previous experience rather than a natural instinct which we are meant to be given. It becomes easier if you approach the test scientifically. But I guess that's the difference between someone taking it who is NT and who is on the spectrum. The NT will just "know" the answer whilst someone on the spectrum has to put a lot of effort in to scientifically figure out what emotion corresponds to what picture.

Here's the test if anybody else is interested:
http://glennrowe.net/BaronCohen/Faces/EyesTest.aspx

Amazon - The Artist's Complete Guide to Facial Expression by Gary Faigin
This is one of the most valuable references I have ever gotten. Both for being able to produce the needed expression on the page, and for reading them in real life.

Here is one of the reviews:
Yes, this is a book meant to be used by artists and enthusiasts, and it is good for that. I am using this book in another way. For people with NLD (Nonverbal Learning Disorders) and on the autistic spectrum (Pervasive Developmental Disorder(PDD), Autism and Aspergers) it is an invaluable instructive tool for teaching how to read facial expressions, and how we use our musculature to form these expressions. I'd been searching for a book like this for years, but was looking in all the wrong places: psychology, social skills, spectrum disorder studies, and psychiatric tomes directed toward the therapeutic community. Then I found this book, serendipitously, at an art store. I am so grateful! My son has high functioning autism, and is terribly frustrated trying to understand non-verbal and social language cues. This book satisfied him in every way, and he now studies it. Not only is he learning the difference between subtle facial expressions, but he is learning how these expressions are made, physiologically. He is becoming more expressive himself, and more able to understand the clues of every day social interactions. I have given this book as a gift to Speech/Language Pathologists who deal with Pragmatic Language skills, to Occupational Therapists, to psychologists and psychiatrists who run social skills groups to help kids and adults navigate the social maze, and to my nephew, a professional clown (on the order of Bill Irwin and Jeff Hoyle, not Emmet Kelley) who is fashioning an act involving social cluelessness (a very common subject in commedy, when you think about it). For these reasons, I highly recommend this book to professionals and parents who are the mentors, friends and teachers of NLD and spectrum disorder people and those people themselves. Terrific. I give it the highest possible marks.

Oh man, eyes are so important for reading people.

Karilyn, I skimmed most of your post because it would take me a couple of hours to read it all. What I skimmed was really good.

Texas Hold Em, Players keep their eyes down, wear hats or the amazing crazy ones can "lie" with their eyes.

Right handed people:
-look to the right when going from memory (what they believe to be true-> most likely telling the truth), unattraction
-look to the left when going to the 'thinking'->most likely lying boldly. Also shows attraction.
-looking down left then down show embarashment, and/or very attracted to.

Left handed people: the reverse^

I'm NT and I mess up ALL the time 'reading' lefties in texas hold em because I have to cognitively check for hand dominance and then reverse the eyes and meaning.

I mockingly accuse my left-handed cousin of being sinister (latin for evil) because I get caught up in reading his eyes and I loose track of the game!

Hmm interesting. I was actually watching a 2 year old child's eyes today flicker from one side to the other. I hardly do that unless I turn my whole head with it.

Eye contact is pretty damn hard for me and full contact can send a chill up my spine but I'll try to see what focusing on the muscles does. The scientific research says when some autistics make eye contact the areas of the brain that light up in NT's don't light up for us. But I shall test out your theory before coming to a conclusion.

As I understand it, when NT eyes are doing their thing, the rest of their facial muscles are playing along, so that the social dance between people continues. For us, that doesn't happen. Even if we're paying attention to the eyes, the responsive micro expressions don't work.

This is my opinion a week after having figured this out.

Well the micro expressions are still mechanical in nature. I've found I'm having a lot of success in mimicking them, and Neurotypicals seem to agree that I've got it down pretty well. There have been a few times where one of my mimicked eye expressions has been off, but from what I'm being told, even Neurotypicals apparently have times where they occasionally can't read a person's facial expression, so while it's a badly executed mimicry on my part, they just perceive it as being "I don't know what she's thinking," which occurs even with Neurotypicals.

Everybody's reporting that it's like my expressiveness was plugged into an amplifier, so obviously the mimicry is working, as that is the same response I gave when I realized that I was supposed to be reading the muscles of the eyes, not the eyes themselves.

Personally I find now that I know what I'm doing, that eye muscles are a hundred times easier to read and mimic than tone of voice, which I had gotten a fair bit of control over around age 21 or so. I've almost stopped trying to read people's tone of voice entirely because it's so much harder than eye muscles. Tone of voice requires me to pick up on pitch shifts and stuff. Whereas the eye muscles is purely an exercise in height/width ratios, angles, and shapes. Elementary geometry. If you think of it as geometry, it's not that hard.

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Last edited by nat4200 on 19 Apr 2012, 3:44 am, edited 1 time in total.

That wasn't what I meant, and I do not believe it is what Peterd was referring to either. By microexpressions, I meant it as the opposite of macroexpressions. IE, big and small expressions. Gesturing and waving of arms is macro, as is a smile or a frown. Micro is aspects of expression which are smaller in detail, like subtle muscle movements; it's the things which refine the concept of "This person is happy" and makes it easier to separate this into things like... love, contentment, joy, pleasure, pleased, excited, facinated, and other variations of the concept of "happy" which appears to be communicated largely by these subtle muscle movements.

I understand now that you possess a vocabulary word which was not in my vocabulary, and apologize for using the term microexpressions incorrectly. I was not and still am not referring to microexpressions, and will not refer to them at any point in this post.

It is my understanding that NTs do perceive these shifts in muscle movement (not microexpressions) around the eyes and face , but only on an unconscious level. It is also my understanding, that all people, both Neurotypical and Autistic, can learn to perceive these on a conscious level. The difficulty for Autistic people comes in that we don't appear to be able to process these subtle muscle movements unconsciously, and have to take a conscious effort to learn what they mean, and then read them. Neurotypicals can do this too, but they usually don't have a need to, unless they are like, poker players, or artists, or other people who need to be able to consciously understand what these movements mean.



Oh yeah, that's really what I do too, and it's really kinda a fun puzzle to work out. Piecing together all the little bits of context to figure out what these Neurotypicals are thinking inside their brains. Even though I love my girlfriend, I often consider her to be my own personal little lab rat for me to observe and examine and poke and prode to figure out how a Neurotypical's brain works. I figure that having my own personal Neurotypical who's mind I can play with on a regular basis will help me derive more complex patterns than meeting different Neurotypicals on an irregular basis.

(Can you tell that my Autistic obsession / special interest thingy, is Neurotypical brains and Neurotypical social structures? Makes me feel like Jane Goodall.)

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Last edited by nat4200 on 19 Apr 2012, 3:45 am, edited 4 times in total.

FYI and all,

It's a visual processing problem in autism, and the more complex the structure (not many things more complex than the human face), the harder it is to look at, so "we" look away. Easy to replicate and test by looking at 2D images and video of people, which don't cause the discomfort that looking at a 3D person does.

If it hurts, you tend to avoid such.

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Last edited by nat4200 on 19 Apr 2012, 3:46 am, edited 1 time in total.

Thanks for posting this, helped me a lot. I never thought to take significance in muscle movements around people's eyes. I think I always assumed it was a quirky thing a lot of people did. I guess I don't make many of these gestures, which would probably explain why some people find it hard to tell if I'm being humorous/sarcastic or serious.

“At the end of the day, my brain is still an Autistic brain, and still thinks on a very literal and analytical level, but Neurotypicals are so fun to try and understand (It's kind of an odd one, but Neurotypicals are totally my obsessive Autistic specialist subject thingy, and I can't get enough of studying these little strange thinking Neurotypicals around me)”

Perhaps you could document this NT tribe? Take an anthropological portrait of them…

I did photography and one of my favorite projects was based off of “Tribes of New York”, Richard Avedon’s portraits and ‘anthropological tribal portraits’ and ‘anthropological portraits’ (google what I quoted). My project was Tribes of UIC. We had janitors, math student, professors et cetera et cetera. I told them I was going to do a side portrait then frontal portrait. I found that doing it in that order made the subject being photographed not focus their eyes in the camera when they faced it and gave them a blank and expressionless face. They’d automatically stair ahead for the side profile. My editors and I remarked about how I captured the perfect anthropological scientific emotionless face. We were shocked. It was an effort and an art to ‘remove’ (idk) the emotions from the subjects. I remember reviewing the photographs and rejecting my first couple of batches for showing too much ‘emotion.’ I didn’t cognitively understand it and when one time on accident a subject did a side profile first then a front one, I saw less emotion but cognitively I thought that they had the ‘look.’

I took the test and I was a photographer and I’m only average? What?

Pink horse thing for avatar-girl, girlfriend-boy but why does he have a pink horse thing?, clicked on profile to message and female (did I read boyfriend or girlfriend? OH!) edit on eyes thread. Humorous confusion.

I'm not sure it's so much the complexity that makes it creepy, as the failure to comprehend the complexity which makes it creepy.

What I've figured out from the communication that I've had with others, is that prior to learning this task, my eyes looked like the eyes of a dead body. A corpse. This made it so Neurotypicals found it kind of creepy looking at me, even if they couldn't place a finger on why. And I think Neurotypicals have this experience with most Autistics. Which is why you get some who assume that we are cold, or lack emotion, even though we certain feel on the inside.

After a week or so of consciously moving my eye muscles every time I talked with Neurotypicals, I'm starting to feel somewhat mentally fatigued, and yesterday my girlfriend started noticing me "resting my eyes" so-to-speak, and going back to "corpse eyes."

If this is what an Autistic person's eyes look like to a Neurotypical who can't perceive the movement of the eyes, then it would follow logically that is what an Autistic person sees in a Neurotypical's eyes when we cannot perceive the movement in their eyes. And it does fit with what I've said over the years; that the eyes look dead, like glass, and it's creepy and unnerving. I didn't necessarily think of it in terms of Neurotypical eyes looking like the eyes of a dead body to me, but it's pretty obvious I'm describing something like that. And I don't feel that effect anymore now that I've learned to observe these muscle movements.


I want to experiment with this one. But if I was to guess, I'd think that there probably IS a very slight effect, but only when you are already producing the correct tone of voice. So much of the production of sound with the human mouth is based on the shape of the mouth. So surely smiling would produce a slight change in the sound which is produced, due to having a different shape.

But smiling alone is likely not enough to produce this effect, even if some Neurotypicals believe it is. I would definitely believe that it could possibly enhance the tone which is already being produced, even if it is only purely something non-real that Neurotypicals are perceiving in their mind, due to their mind playing tricks on them.


I've considered eventually writing a book. Something akin to "The Psychology of the Neurotypical Mind as Studied by the Autistic Mind." Uh, it probably wouldn't be light reading material.


You're the second person I've caught in this thread assuming that I'm male because I have a girlfriend. Sort of makes me wish this forum put gender under your avatar next to your posts next to where it has your age

Don't worry, it's not an uncommon mistake. I generally expect people to get it wrong online, if it's not a place where people knwo me already. The default assumption is that everybody you meet online is male, and the idea that I have a girlfriend reinforces that assumption. Neurotypical minds like to connect dots like that which may not necessarily exist.