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lau
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21 Feb 2007, 7:55 pm

calibaby wrote:
is too much eye contact/staring an autistic trait?

Others can correct me if I get this wrong, but I think it's not so much a question of too much / little. It's just having no idea of what it's all about. No hard-wired channel of "eye-talk" (whatever that's all about) with the "appropriate" 70-80% (?) contact.

After 59 years of practice, I've got it roughly right. A bit like a deaf person who has managed to speak at the correct loudness, but still isn't sure if he's speaking in a language the listener knows?



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22 Feb 2007, 1:44 am

I'm fairly ok with eye contact the majority of the time. I'll look and look away at the right times, and I'll register most of what the eyes are saying. Even if I don't get how to respond some of the time.

But I do remember Dad quoting the karate kid when I was younger. At least 5 times a day I'd get "Look in eye, _____-san!" so I'm thinking I probably used to have some problems.



Claradoon
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22 Feb 2007, 2:21 am

I loathe eye contact but learned to do it if I have to. It's kind of odd, though, because if I do eye contact it encourages people to expect even more eye contact, and by then I'm running for the hills ... maybe it's not such a good idea after all.

If you're having trouble recognizing people or remembering faces, you might want to look at this site:

www.prosopagnosia.com



Zhaozhou
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22 Feb 2007, 5:49 am

As a child I read that Europeans, unlike Americans, weren't required to hold that much eye-contact (it could be even interpreted as some kind of slightly aggressive behaviour), so I thought it was normal until I read about ASD and started to see how other people interact (I never noticed there was a check-in).



RachelLugiagirl
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22 Feb 2007, 6:24 am

Luckily I was taught eye contact as a listening skill for a job when I was 22 and learned to do it in preference to listening to boring depressing or shouting stuff sometimes.



maldoror
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22 Feb 2007, 7:00 am

I'm good with it about 80% of the time; I must have learned at some point.

What is it, exactly, that makes us want to look away, I wonder? For me I feel like when I make eye contact with a person they are looking into my soul or something. 8O



ZanneMarie
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22 Feb 2007, 9:29 am

That sounds like an overload sensation. I feel two things - that they want to look inside my soul and the overwhelming feeling that I have no clue what their look means.


I can do it to get on, but here's what I've found out happens (sometimes it's good to be a manager because after your employees know you long enough they tell you these things). I do it and I'm think I'm doing it right for years. I am talking years! Then, suddenly I will say something to one of my employees and they will look at me strangely and say, "You NEVER do it right. Everyone just gets weirded out by it and finally gets over it because we all know you're stranger than s__t and we still like you." I get that about many things. Like I will think I am acutally getting subcontexts and jokes and references to pop culture things, then I say something because I'm comfortable with that person and get told that everyone knows I do it wrong, they just have gotten over it and moved on. That's about the point where I feel like I've put this massive, exhausting effort into it and it didn't work anyway. In the end, they just decided what I knew and how I treated them (fairly, stood up for them, got them decent raises) is what actually made the difference and not my pretense at eye contact and the rest of it.


This sums it up perfectly. I got this in a Christmas card from a uber NT woman (she's a trainer and very feely so we are polar opposites in personality not to mention NT/AS). "You're still strange, but I like ya anyway. Let's do lunch." That is the perfect summation of my forays into the NT world. They end up kind of comical, but for the fact that they exhaust me. (Dealing with me probably exhausts her too.) That woman by the way absolutely hated me when I first worked with her. We've even talked about that. I didn't put it in AS terms because that was 1996 when we met. But, it was a classic NT/AS communication breakdwon. It took three years for her to get comfortable and figure out that I wasn't being mean to her, that I really didn't get it. She honestly did think I was messing with her. She says it was because I was so intelligent (hey, as long as she's impressed!) she just couldn't comprehend that I really couldn't understand those things, but later, she did finally see that it was consistent and happened with everyone, not just her. Now, we do go to lunch or even to some clothing stores! I even took a trip to Colorado with her twice. But, we've also learned how to get along. We don't change who we are, but we just know our limits with each other. We can only handle so much of each other because we are polar opposites. But, that's ok. I'm still strange, but she likes me anyway. She's still overly needy and gushy, but I kind of like her too. :wink:



Graelwyn
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22 Feb 2007, 11:14 am

ZanneMarie wrote:
That sounds like an overload sensation. I feel two things - that they want to look inside my soul and the overwhelming feeling that I have no clue what their look means.


That is EXACTLY how I feel when someone looks in my eyes...that they will see everything that I am and I don't like it as I worry what they might see.



Sedaka
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22 Feb 2007, 11:49 am

it's the same reason ghostbusters never cross lazerbeams :)

i'm ok at eye contact. i can bounce around their face... i watch mouths... especially with foreign people... i remember actually telling people as i meet them that i just kinda am an auditory listener cause i had noticed that i tend to offend people by not looking at them (even before knowing that eye contact was an AS thing or about AS at all).

for me... my mind goes blank pretty much like it does in a very climatitic moment ***coug, cough***

like if i were TALKING and DID manage to look directly into someone's eyes, my mind would blank and i would keep staring at them and who knows what would start coming out of my mouth... i don't even know if i would be standing at my next moment of clarity!

i have to talk to people a lot at work... luckily i am either drawing to explain stuff or someone is drawing it instead... :)


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22 Feb 2007, 4:32 pm

Professor X here, in regards to Eye Contact being an issue? :arrow: In my own words I still have troubles in being able to look into another's eye withotu appearing to be gazing un-normally long :oops: or, not being able to look in a manner that will be perceived as being okay to the other person.Either way I've learned to look at someone's nose, not star at in weird way just, use it as a focal point to maintain my recognition of an ongoing conversation. This might come off as being absurd :( yet, It's one of the few techniques which works for me in most one-one conversations.This does it for me.

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22 Feb 2007, 5:03 pm

I don't have trouble looking at a person's eyes in a picture or on the movie screenn,but if it's in real life and they are standing 2 feet in front of me,then I'll get a little upset if I have to make eye-contact.


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TigerFire
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22 Feb 2007, 5:32 pm

For me I'm getting better at eye contact when it comes to just you and another person talking but if you are hanging out with more than one person I can't keep up with the many who are talking to me.


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