Are your facial expressions either absent or exaggerated?

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I dunno, I can't see it.

Look in the mirror

Ask your family

This is exactly how I am. I either make weird faces and have an overly expressive face, or I don't do anything with my face at all. My grandma always says I need to smile more. She likes me to smile when I come to her car if she's picking me up somewhere, but it's not natural for me to do that so I usually end up with this weird half grin thing. She always thinks I'm upset when I'm not smiling, but I just don't smile unless something really excites me or I find something hilarious.

Not there natualy but I remind my self to at least to smile and say good mornig to coworkers and it has helped immesurably with the way I get treated at work. Aparantly they thought I was a stone or all ways pissed off.

Last edited by johnny77 on 16 Apr 2012, 10:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That's very interesting, you should make a video expressing these various forms and identifying them, I think something like that would be a great help to people here. I know I have trouble reading facial expressions and tone of voice.

I've heard there are several forms of perfecting your body language and expressions such as expressing yourself in a mirror, watching sitcom shows and socializing in general.

I asked a close friend what my facial expressions are like, and he said they're very "SPHINX-LIKE" - hopefully I got the spelling of that correct!

I told him to elaborate; he said it doesn't mean my expressions are blank, but rather hard to decipher. I asked other ppl, pretty much the same thing: HARD TO READ.

LOL! I'm not hiding anything, however. I am quite open as a person. I also find other people quite "hard to read".

ALSO, people tell me to smile - and it gets annoying because I am happy! haha oh well.

BTW> I do not have a diagnoses but I took the quiz and the results are:

Your Aspie score: 140 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 59 of 200
You are very likely an Aspie

Plus my AQ is 32 and I took multiple times and the same score came up - 32.

So I will try to make arrangements with a doctor and see if I have aspergers... is that how it goes?

I find I can't do it in a mirror. I think it's somewhat akin to no matter what you do, you can't observe your pupils in your eyes not staring directly at the mirror, even though I'm certain aware that I can make my eyes shift and move in my head to look at things without turning my head, and that I can deliberately look at things out of the corner of my eyes without moving my pupils. Yet I cannot replicate this task in a mirror for some reason.

I could try making a video of it. I think I could get me, and my girlfriend together, and record both of us.

I feel somewhat relieved for knowing that a lot of it is an inexact science even among Neurotypicals. Because as long as I am at least doing SOMETHING, instead of just doing nothing, and that what I am doing is remotely close to right, it is perceived as being part of the natural variation in human expression, and Neurotypicals seem to not be tipped off that I'm doing it consciously.

EDIT: Oh that was just REALLY weird. I tried to record my own eyes, just out of curiosity, and tried to move my muscles in the ways that I've figured out how too. I ran the playback, and it's like staring into a different face than my own. It's really trippy. I noticed that what it felt like I was doing, didn't actually match what I was doing, and I was even doing a few things I didn't realize I was doing. Like, my girlfriend had explained to me that when a person is scared or nervous their eyes shift somewhat irregularly and dart around them. And I thought I had forgotten to do that while mimicking fear, but I had actually done it when I watched the playback. It was really cool. Apparently I've cemented some of this stuff to reflexive memory and I didn't even realize it. The human mind is REALLY strange.

Absent.

Unless I'm laughing, absent for the most part. People tell me I should smile more but my smiles come out strained and weird-looking. I don't think I'm photogenic either.

I can relate.

I cannot smile geniunely if I am forced to do it.

Sometimes my facial expression are "normal" I guess, but not all the time.