Eye Contact

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My ability to make eye contact gets better if I know the person I'm talking to. For instance, I can't look directly in the eyes of someone I've just met, but if it is someone who I've met several times, I can manage to make eye contact more often. Still, I have a hard time making consitant eye contact with someone who I've been talking to for an extended period of time. At that point, my eyes get bored, and they wonder off. Sometimes I focus on a part of the face that does not have the eyes, to give the impression that I'm at least looking at the person I'm talking to.

Still, I think I'm getting better at it.

Same here... it really does help my comprehension of what's being said, I've found.

Same here. Though I think I've improved somewhat. I used to not look at the person at all.

Now I try to make eye contact, but I think I don't do it properly, because people react like I am staring too much.

Ugh, I hate this aspect of AS too!

My Dad always said that anyone who can't look you in the eye is dishonest. Being that I am naturally wired to be an honest person, I worked really hard at my eye contact, so that I didn't take the chance that someone thougth I was lying. My Dad was right though, for NTs, if they don't look you in the eye, they are dishonest. I have learned this over and over again.

I don't like looking in peoples' eyes, b/c then my brain reads them and I find that I know a lot about them and then they bore me, unless I try and shut my brain off, or it's someone I know very well and I like them.

My husband gave me a trick: look people between the eyes, then they think you are looking in their eyes. The real challenge is trying to do that without giving the person the Aspie Death Stare (my husband calls it that). I find it works though and then I do what a previous poster said and look away every few seconds to give my eyes a break and so that person doesn't think I want to kill them

Tallgirl.

Are we talking eye-contact or general face-contact???

I cannot do eyes for one and even if I try, I still have an overwhelming urge to look at what the person is saying (it helps me to understand it better and catch words I might have otherwise missed-- auditory processing problems).

It is difficult.

I save my best eye contact for work but it is a huge effort and I have to have periods when I relax it. Like many people here I tend to look at the mouth more.

When I am able to relax with people who understand I tend to look completely away when I am talking to them.

Even with my wife (who I've known for 30 years) it can be difficuly at times (usually when I'm stressed or under pressure).

When I have to I can do it.

When I first got together romantically with my wife she insisted on staring into each other's eyes for long periods. It was excruciatingly painful.

I have this problem with staring into people's eyes, that I keep flitting between their left and right eyes, thus my eyes move really fast and it loses any intimacy or specialness it might ever have had. (Is specialness a word? Apparently I have a tendancy to make up words as I need them, according to an educational psychologist's report)

I don't have AS. I have Dyspraxia and they suspected ADHD. But I have bad social skills. My concentration is terrible, and I can't understand body language. I've got better through watching other people. But my eye contact is poor. I read somewhere that you're supposed to look at people most of the time when they're talking to you, then look away and look at them when you're talking. Some people I like having eye contact with, some people I find it more difficult. Some days, it's all natural, but other days, eye contact confuses me so much I lose track of what the conversation is about. On my Parent's Evening, I wasn't looking any of my teachers in the eye when they were talking to me, I was looking around the room or at the table. Also, sometimes while looking around the room, I make eye contact with people in class, and that makes me nervous and uneasy because I don't know what they think it means.

How's this for a nightmare?

You wake up deaf.

You need to learn how to lipread.

The only way to understand people is lipreading.

Thats pretty much the reality for me, except I was implanted with a cochlear implant when I was about 13 y.o. so now I have pretty much normal hearing, but in noisy situations ( I still can't filter out the noise) I completely lipread. In a acoustically perfect situation with a person speaking perfect english the ratio of hear/lipread is something like 3/1. Typically it is 1 to 1, meaning I have to force myself to look directly at the person, and eye contact is a very natural thing to do when they look at your eyes, so I flicker very quickly from lips to eyes, lips to eyes. If neccessary I will break away complelty and start over. Real stressful. It feels like watching a drill the size of a battleship cannon being pressed into my solar plexus.

The upshot to not getting implanted is that I am not permentaly scared emotionally like so many of the people in here, having pretty much not heard whatever invective my classmates threw at me. I was pretty happy until I was implanted, but I would still have done it despite all that pain of finding out how weird I was.

Also, if I did not understand emotionally what someone said, I can ask them to repeat it and observe more carefully and get closer to what they meant

On top of that, my implant marks me as disabled and most people are standoffish about this, and don't generally bother me unless it is actually important, hence I don't get dragooned into small talk often. On the downside, some people feel a lot of pity for me, so they ask me for my ****ing life story, which I don't want to share with you, thank you very much.

I have never been diagonsed with AS, or HFA, but I think my deafness really masked all that delay of language skills and all that. I am prob. hyperleixic (had the reading level of a coll. graduate in 7th grade) which is doubly odd for a deaf guy to acquire as most of them only acheive a 4th grade reading level.

I have little problem with eye contact when I am sitting in a group. If I am one-on-one with another person I can hardly make eye contact at all.

This is hard for me too. There's maybe six people I have good contact with, the others it's the opposite.

What do you guys think other people think when they see this? At school, I use to do this a lot. It seemed to make some people uncomfortable but I couldn't help it. I've found different people take it a different way.

Some people think I'm not nervous and then when they come up to me for a few minutes, it suprises them that I am so nervous and they are somewhat amazed.

Eye contact is very hard. I scan the face for one or two seconds to look after that at any other thing, like a window or a bookshelf or watch other people doing their work.

I dislike it too, when persons on photographs look straight on the observer.

I can only look at peoples eyes for short periods, a few seconds.

At work I usually look for a few seconds and then focus on something else while maintaining the conversation.

Same for family & friends, except for a few I have got used to.

I find it too uncomfortable and start to get very shifty and begin rubbing my hands together, stroking my cheeks and getting very itchy and fidgety. A bit paranoid at times, but only under intense scrutiny from a group.

If I have a pen to roll in my hands or chew the end of then I focus on that and I'm fine, absorbing the conversation ok.

Around 10 minutes ago I was talking to a teacher about how to position a picture using a .css file (geeky huh?) and when I walked away I realized that my shirt was soaked with sweat. does any one else have this problem?

Eye contact? What's that?

It's simply something I don't do... if I do do it, it's very very uncommon, as somebody earlier in the thread mentioned it, "micro-second" glances. I tend to even look away from the general direction of the people. I don't like the sensory load is places on me. I can either listen, or I can look - but not both.

Can't do it without forcing myself.

Really makes talking to other people a pain. Seems like they think I'm trying to lie to them or something, or they start asking what's wrong with me. Makes talking to my blind housemate much easier, because you can't make eye contact with someone who's blind, thank goodness!

Well ya can, but its kinda a waste of time......