Everything I Know About Social Skills

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Social Theory

I'm kind of nervous about posting this because I'm not sure how much of it is right. I just know that the world makes a lot more sense to me in light of the things I put in this essay than it does without. I spent a lot of effort getting all of this together, including over $1000 of material on social behavior (books on a variety of subjects, videos how to recognize minute involuntary facial expressions, some stuff by pick-up artists, etc), and I spent most of my waking moments in High School trying to put it into practice. I probably got rejected by about 40 girls (each after serious effort) while learning this stuff. But I don't have any official qualifications. I'm not going to try to prove anything I say. Most of this is a synthesis of all the different things I read, with a few additions that I added myself. If you want to skip to the social advice that you can actually use, then scroll down until you see white space and then "Social Behavior."


Emotions are an evolutionary construct to get animals to do the things they need to do to survive and reproduce. They were created through trial and error (the error being when animals died before they were able to reproduce) without any conscious guide or central purpose. So, as with any structure created through evolution, they are messy and attain their goals without any awareness of purpose.

Having spontaneous desires is necessary for an animal because it has to do very specific things to survive but in most cases does not have the time or intelligence to figure out what these things are. Humans, coming from lowly origins and having a bumbling reasoning capacity that takes years to develop, are no exception to this rule.

Viewing emotions through an evolutionary standpoint like this invites a rigorous definition of emotion. The definition I have chosen is that an emotion is the disposition of an animal's faculties towards a particular type of action that is triggered by a certain logical inference. For instance, anger is the disposition of an animal towards violence and it is triggered when the animal recognizes that some sort of willful entity is obstructing the animal's desires (one of these could be to avoid danger).

I have divided the types of drives that an animal can experience into emotions, desires, and instincts. Emotion, as has already been stated, requires logical inference for both the trigger and the execution of the emotion. Desires are triggered automatically by some sort of bodily response, but require a thinking process to attain the goal. Instincts might be triggered by anything, but require no thought to execute; their functions are preprogrammed. I shall provide some examples. Emotions: Anger, sadness, jealousy, happiness, hatred; Desires: hunger, thirst, lust (usually), sleepiness; Instincts: fight or flight, the physical processes of sex (like getting an erection and thrusting), blinking when something gets in your eye. Emotions are the drives over which one has the most control, so they will be the topic of most (if not all) the rest of the essay.

Because emotions require a logical inference to trigger, the emotional sophistication of an animal should be related in some way to its intelligence. So it is reasonable that less intelligent animals like alligators cannot feel more complicated emotions like betrayal because in this case that involves the belief that something has an obligation to one, and then the recognition that that obligation has in some way been neglected.


It is not possible for an animal to do anything other than to attempt satisfaction of its desires and improvement in emotional state until their mental processes quit functioning. In other words, the basis of our actions is not rational. If it were entirely rational we would be like computers sitting around without a masters and we would allow ourselves to die in apathy. Emotions are at the head and reason is a tool it uses to satisfy its goals.

From this one can conclude that a person's deepest philosophical beliefs (like everything else) are determined by nothing other than what that person thinks will cause him/her the greatest emotional satisfaction. That is why it is often painful to change them and why people resist new ideas so vigorously. Destroying a person's core beliefs is the same as destroying what currently makes that person happy. This is my explanation for religion and certain types of insanity.

Interesting things happen when one is confronted with a situation that makes satisfaction of emotional needs impossible, or if cognitive dissonance becomes too overwhelming. The most prominent things that can happen (by prominent, I mean that I can't think of anything else that can happen, but I don't want to exclude any possibilities) are suicide, self re-evaluation, and insanity. Self re-evaluation is what it sounds like; a re-evaluation of what one considers valuable. If it happens quickly it is typically very painful, but sometimes drags out across a person's entire life, and is usually involuntary. It sometimes mixes with insanity (especially if done unconsciously), which is a change in one's perception of reality. Whether or not, and to what extent one becomes insane rather than re-evaluated in emotionally stressful situations is entirely circumstantial, as it is an unconscious process dependent on one's emotional needs. If re-evaluation takes place consciously, it often involves the realization that emotional needs are entirely arbitrary and can be changed if necessary. I believe that Nietzsche describes this experience in one of his works (I can't remember which), calling the moment of enlightenment a moment of despair rather than elation, and I believe what he meant by uebermensch was someone who, as a result of this realization and re-evaluation, became the dictator of his own law and purpose. Habitual re-evaluation to avoid pain is the central idea of Buddhism.

It is interesting that one can never know whether the form of reality that one has constructed in one's mind is the real one or some insane version that one uses to protect one's fragile ego. Actually, I do know with certainty that I am insane, because I think about the world as a place filled with objects with definite shape and position in a 3 dimensional space, and I think of those objects as moving through uniform and continuous time, and unless I stop myself I view my emotions as inherently valuable. But I can't do anything else, so I accept my insanity and move on.

Emotional thinking is a complicated emotional response to a complicated problem, which often has surprisingly good results. For instance, once there was a programming competition to see which program could spend the fewest years in prison in several rounds of the prisoner problem, which is a game where one can betray a fellow inmate to get out of prison sooner, and one gets a severe penalty if one is betrayed and doesn't also betray, but the average prison time between the two inmates is smallest if neither betray each other. The winning program only used 3 lines of code and it gave the same answer as what the other inmate did last time. People do this spontaneously and it is called Tit-for-Tat. Another well adapted emotional response is used for tribal warfare. Typically when different groups of people get into conflict they associate with their in-group, demonize the out-group, and rally around their leader. It's an emotional response that essentially allows an entire population that might never have had experience with combat to behave in a militarily intelligent fashion. I think it is obvious why such a response would evolve. The biggest manifestations of the tribal warfare instinct in the western world today are spectator sports, and the government of the USA using the threat of terrorism as an excuse to simultaneously infringe upon the freedoms of and rally support of the voters.

Morals are a form of emotional thought that aid in the function of society. Like all drives, they cannot be logically justified, but evidently they are good at getting people what they really want, otherwise they would not have evolved. It speaks poorly to man's reasoning ability that behaving morally is what's best at getting him what he wants, but that most people use their reasoning ability to justify going against their moral intuition. I can say with confidence that moral behavior is generally the best at getting people what they want because indisputably the greatest satisfaction most people get out of life comes from the relationships they form with other people, and their relationships are not going to be very healthy if they do mean things to people who have Tit-for-Tat emotional responses. It makes obvious sense from an evolutionary perspective to desire the company and support of others because a physically weak species like homosapians can't go it alone like a tiger or an alligator. Furthermore our greatest tool, the brain, is put to poor use if it has to relearn everything the previous generation did because they didn't bother to get together and share their ideas.



In order for there to be some sort of communication, or even for any kind of thought, there must be some sort of relationship that is assumed a priori. I am sure programmers are already familiar with this, as it is their job to create “thinking” machines. There is a part of every computer (I think it's called the bios, but I'm not very good at remembering names and I'm not terribly familiar with the details of computers) which cannot be reprogrammed and upon which all other components of the computer are based. It has basic logic functions like multiplication and addiction. This is necessary because the 1s and 0s (they are actually high and low voltages) that are fed into the computer have no inherent meaning, so there must be something in the computer that can derive some sort of meaning from it that is inherent in its design. Without assuming some sort of relationship, if one were given a long list of 1s and 0s, the smartest people on earth would not ever be able to figure out the meaning. It is for this reason that the axis powers were not able to crack the code based on the language of the Navajo Indians during WWII. The Americans were able to break the German and Japanese codes, however, because they were able to assume that the messages they intercepted had something to do with the war effort and were in some way related to the German and Japanese languages, which were understood. They also had the help of the first computers. However, the Germans and Japanese had no knowledge of the Navajo language, so figuring out their code was literally impossible.

In exactly the same way that the allies needed to have some understanding of the German and Japanese languages to crack their codes, babies who learn languages must have some sort of a priori knowledge about how people communicate in order to pick up the spoken languages that we are all familiar with. If one posits that this a priori knowledge has to do with the emotional responses that people have (I think one will find that this is a very reasonable assumption that is backed up by considerable empirical evidence), then in order for it to work, our typical baby must assume, one, that her emotions are the same as everyone else's, two, that the way she expresses herself is the same as everybody else, and thirdly, we must assume that the baby begins to learn verbal language by comparing the verbal messages to the emotional ones that it receives during an interaction that it observes. Scientists have actually discovered how this works in the brain. There are “mirror neurons” which automatically cause a person to mimic or think about mimicking the behavior that ones sees, and because a normal person views their emotional responses and their emotions to be identical (for instance a smile = happiness), this causes a person to feel the emotion that she sees another experience. This means that empathy is an involuntary process, an instinct. Mirror neurons are longer, more interconnected, and therefore less flexible than most other neurons, which means that their function is similar to that of the bios in a computer.

There are a couple very important conclusions which we can draw from this. The fact that babies are able to use their a priori knowledge about emotion to learn verbal language means that the typical topic of conversation is emotional in nature. They could not possibly use their emotional knowledge to gain an understanding of a language if people only talked to each other about math. Also, because conversation is a spontaneous activity that relies on similarity of emotion and emotional responses, differences are seen as inherently hostile. So in a sense, ordinary people are born bigots and tolerance is a virtue which must be learned, not the other way around.

The problem with communication for autistic people comes in their lack of a priori knowledge about emotion. This explains their early difficulty in learning language, but allows them to excel verbally at a later age as they often do (as lacking knowledge isn't directly correlated to lacking intelligence), but continue to have difficulty understanding other peoples' intentions. I would hypothesize that because autistic people have limited ability to understand the emotional significance of what is being said as a child, that they must learn language by listening to conversations that have a functional purpose. Perhaps it is for this reason, and not because they are born with a lesser interest in emotion, that they develop a greater interest in actions and things than the ordinary child. Having obsessions and being excessively nerdy may simply have developed out of habit. I have learned a great deal about how conversations work, but I did it at such a late age (not learning it methodically until the age of 15), that most of it has not become intuitive. I think it may be possible to explicitly teach autistic children about how emotions work at a young enough age for it to become intuitive and therefore to eliminate or reduce the long-term social ineptitude inherent in the condition.

A brief note on love: I would define it as the thing that happens when one person's happiness become dependent on another's.


I have attached more specific information about social behavior below. I don't use it as much any more because I find that it is very difficult to use and I enjoy interactions with people better when they accept me for who I am. I use it mostly now only to understand other people, but do not use it so much to express myself. I have no authority other than my own to give this sort of advice and I developed it for my own use, so it is entirely possible that the same things that I found useful might not be useful to you (or might even be wrong). If you are planning on using this, then it is important to pay close attention to how people behave when you try to use my advice and to modify your behavior if something I said doesn't work well for you. The ultimate goal of this sort of using this social advice is to learn it so thoroughly that it becomes intuitive (this can only be done with practice).






Social Behavior

RULE NUMBER ONE: Pretend like you know what you are doing, and other people will believe you.


Neurotypicals have the capacity to instantaneously understand what another person is feeling without any conscious effort. It is possible for them to do this because they are wired to mimic or think about mimicking the actions of other people, and that they all share identical emotional responses.

An emotional response is some sort of action that is associated with an emotion. For instance, for neurotypicals, a smile and happiness are the same thing. So when one neurotypical sees another neurotpycial smiling and allows herself to smile back (it takes more effort not to do this than to allow it to happen), she will feel the exact same emotions the other is feeling. Smiles and laughter are some of the easiest ways to mutually reinforce an emotion, and it is a very good emotion to feel.

The primary difficulty aspies have in social situations is that their emotional responses (and quite often, also their emotions) are different or lacking all together. So neurotpyicals have no easy ways of knowing what it is that an aspie is feeling. The majority of neurotypicals never realize that their emotional responses are arbitrary, and so will assume in every instance of meeting a discontinuity in emotional responses that the other person is an a**hole.

Another difficulty aspies have with social situations is that they do not derive pleasure from the same things neurotypicals do in an interaction.

So my social advice will be divided into two pieces; a fairly small one describing what it is neurotypicals enjoy in relationships, and a much larger one describing the emotional responses that allow them to do it.

The most simple way of describing what it is neurotypicals find valuable in a relationship (romantic or otherwise) is that they enjoy the sensation of having their emotions be appreciated by another. Neurotpyicals do have conversations about a variety of subjects, but for a normal person, that new scientific thesis won't convince him to be your friend. All conversations that neurotpyicals find emotionally satisfying (they hold their emotions far above their intellect in value) have some sort of emotional message being carried discretely alongside the literal. This is more true of females than males, although it is generally true of both. (this is what is happening if you've ever seem a gaggle of giggly girls that you haven't been able to get a single intelligible sentence out of)

The ways in which neurotpyicals express appreciation of another's emotions: 1. show that your own emotions are similar to the other's emotions—good emotional responses make this a lot easier; 2. give the other person attention when she/he gets emotional—this is entirely reliant upon using realistic emotional responses.

Three ways of responding to people in conversations. There are ways of organizing responses that are different than this, but for the sake of simplification I have decided to make 3 categories and ignore everything that doesn't fit in them. 1. relate a story similar to an experience descried by your conversation partner, 2. ask for more information about what the other person just talked about, 3. Joke.

ShamelessGit's equation for a joke: A literal discontinuity that makes sense with connotative interpretation, ALWAYS ACCOMPANIED BY appropriate emotional responses. There is a particular type of sarcasm that is communicated with a smile and certain voice pitches that will suffice for most jokes. It will be covered in the next section. The emotional responses often provide the needed emotional information to compensate for the lack of literal meaning—without them the joke might not exist.

Romantic attraction: I have never had an occasion to practice being a female, so I will focus only on what the males have to do. Females are attracted to Confidence, Social intelligence, Wealth, and Physical attraction, generally in that order. Women want to be made to feel understood and protected, so things a boyfriend should always make sure he does are look out for nonverbal cues the his girl sends out, and lead her in every interaction. “lead her in every interaction” does not mean that the man makes all the decisions. Women expect (unrealistically, even of their neurotypical counterparts) that the man can tell what she wants without needing to be explicitly told. Women nearly always try to get a message across besides that of the literal. For instance, “I'm hungry”=”plz take me out to eat.” They generally say stuff for a reason, so a boyfriend should look out for the motives behind why his girl might say something that makes no literal sense. A good response to the “I'm hungry” statement might be to offer options for where the couple might go out to eat (pay close attention to emotional responses the girl sends when presented with each option). In this way, the male is relieving the female of the burden of any sort of responsibility, however small, while still giving her what she wants. Ideally, the woman would just sit back on a date and be treated to all of her desires without taking any initiative. And the woman does not necessarily know what she wants before being presented with an option, as she is very receptive to the desires of her partner, her friends, and coincidental happenstance.

Emotional Responses
Facial expressions: Practice this stuff in front of the mirror, and observe neurotpyicals when they produce these emotions. When first starting out, it is likely that your expressions will be exaggerated and make you look more like a monkey than you already look. Sorry, embarrassment is a part of the learning process.

Originally I saved this in a word document and the facial expression part was in a table, which can't copy and paste. I've tried to reformat it, but if you don't understand, then tell me.


Emotion:
Happiness
Appearance:
The power for the smile is drawn from the cheeks, immediately below the eye. The muscles in this region draw up. Usually only the upper teeth are revealed, but in open laughter (often while joking) the lower ones may be revealed. The eye-lids are wrinkled at the outer edge and at a region roughly 45 degrees below that. The muscles that control this are located roughly towards the bottom outside of the eye socket, and they draw the skin on the face inward towards the eyes and slightly up. These wrinkles cause what NT refer to as, “twinkling eyes,” and can occur when amused without a full smile. In a full smile it is important to get both the cheek muscles and eye muscles going at the same time in a spontaneous-appearing-manner. A sarcastic smile is a mix between contempt and a regular smile.
Purpose:
Smiles communicate happiness. They are used in jokes, when meeting people, and when just exceptionally happy. An easy way to know when to smile is when other people in the conversation are smiling.

Emotion:
Disgust
Appearance:
The upper nose is wrinkled, and there is a horse-shoe shaped wrinkle that runs from the outside of the nostrils to the corners of the lips.
Purpose:
It is a bad emotion. Used when presented with foul smelling odors or emotions that the neurotypicals associate with them. It is not used commonly in pleasant conversation. The only use I could think of with someone one cares about would be to show mutual distaste for something the other person mentioned. Positive subject matter is usually better.

Emotion:
Contempt
Appearance:
A unilateral smile. One side of the mouth is drawn straight to the side. The muscle for this is a fat one located in the middle of the cheek.
Purpose:
I honestly don't know what the difference is between contempt and disgust, but they are both bad.

Emotion:
Anger
Appearance:
The space between the eyelashes and eyebrows gets smaller, and the lower eye lids often raise. This is what causes the appearance of a “glare.” This is done by raising the lids and bringing the brows together and down, causing wrinkles between the eyebrows. The lips are often tense and the teeth are bared, and some people flare their nostrils.
Purpose:
A bad emotion associated with social and physical aggression. Don't use it if you don't want to get in a fight.

Emotion:
Sadness
Appearance:
The brows are brought together as with anger, but they are raised in the middle rather than brought down. This will also cause wrinkles between the brows. The corners of the lips are brought down. Tears are, of course, associated with extreme varieties of sadness.
Purpose:
You are sad

Emotion:
Fear
Appearance:
The brows are raised, the eyelids are also raised, and the lips are tense.
Purpose:
You are scared

Emotion:
Surprise
Appearance:
The eyebrows are raised and everything else is relaxed.
Purpose:
It means that something happened that you did not expect. It can be a good or a bad thing.

Emotion:
HI!
Appearance:
Like surprise, but lasting only 1/6 of a second. Don't bother timing it if you're doing this artificially, it is just how long it takes to raise your eyebrows and let them drop again. Always including eye contact. Often with a smile. Only do it once when you first start talking to someone.
Purpose:
It means, “hey I'm pleasantly surprised to see you and I'm willing to talk now.” Without an eyebrow flash, a person does not feel as though they have been given permission to talk. This is usually done unconsciously. People often feel uncomfortable if you talk to them without offering an eyebrow flash. TALKING LOUDER OR INVADING PERSONAL SPACE CANNOT MAKE UP FOR FAILING TO USE AN EYEBROW-FLASH!

Emotion:
I want to talk
Appearance:
Rounding of lips and sucking in air. Subtle.
Purpose:
This is how you but in on conversations. If you just start talking people may not notice or think you are rude. If people ignore your liprounding and air sucking, they are probably involved in what they are talking about and don't want to be interrupted.



Voice intonation:

Most syllables neurotpyicals produce are not the same pitch all the way through. The change in pitch often communicates a message. In general, raising the pitch is a good thing and lowering it is a bad thing. It is often subtle and you need to listen for it or you won't notice (unless you're a neurotpyical, in that case I don't know why you're still reading).

Emphasis: Emphasis is placed in a syllable by exaggerating the raising or lowering of pitch and extending the duration of the syllable. Emphasis can change the meaning of a sentence. For instance, “You were GREAT at the concert,” emphasizes how good you were, and, “YOU were great at the concert,” emphasizes that you, and not someone else, were great. It would mean just the opposite if you lowered the pitch in an exaggerated manner on the emphasis rather than raised the pitch. Emphasis is often associated with hand movements.

Excited Voice Pitch: Words are fast, syllables start on a high note and get higher every time.
STFU Voice Pitch: Syllables start on a low pitch and get lower, especially at the end of the sentence.
Sarcastic Voice Pitch: Generally involving dips in the syllables, especially at the point of sarcasm (the word that means the exact opposite of what you meant) and at the very end.
Playful Sarcasm: Generally involving dips, but often involving more raises in pitch, especially at the point of emphasis. The end of a sarcastic sentence always involves a very exaggerated dip in pitch.
Statement: Beginning with Excited Voice Pitch and ending with STFU Voice pitch. The proportion of a sentence you devote to raised and lowering of pitch changes the strength of the message. It means that what I just said is true and there is no more argument. For instance raise/lower pitch in , “You were Great/at the concert,” would be a complement that there would be no more argument about. It would be used perhaps in a conversation in which the complementee was insecure and trying to downplay his/her role in the concert, and the complementer was getting tired of hearing it.

Personal Space:
Within 1.5 feet. Intimate Space. You don't get this close to anyone except family, your smoochie partner, or the closest friend.
Friendly: 1.5 feet to 4. This is a respectful and affectionate distance. Most emotionally relevant interactions occur at this distance.
4 to 8 feet: People often stand this far apart when they first meet, after shaking, or if they are in a business meeting and have no intention of more personal connection.
More tan 8 feet: The person has no intention of getting to know you better.

It is permissible to ignore these rules if the environment doesn't allow you to follow them easily, but it often causes awkwardness and unusual quiet, such as that experienced in the elevator and the subway.

Body Language:

Open Body Language: This shows a willingness to be “open” with the conversation partner. It is a good thing. Keeping an open chest, and crotch (this rule is a little different for females), and facing your conversation partner is how you do it.

Closed Body Language: Anything that could be used to defend the self when struck is defensive and not a good thing. This includes folding the arms.

Taking up more space is generally viewed as a fairly aggressive and confident posture.

There are a lot of rules, but I'm not going to mention most of them in detail because they get really complicated and aren't as important as the stuff I've already mentioned.

Hands: Open palms are more friendly. Closed fist can be aggressive, but also merely showing great zeal for what someone is saying. Holding the hands as if using a fine tool shows that one is trying to get across a delicate point. If I were a neurotypical trying to describe these things to you in person, I'd be using that sort of hand shape a lot.

Touch: Touching is usually permitted briefly on the outside of the arm. It shows affection. Small touches in the middle of the back are a way to let someone know that you are behind them. Hugging is another good way of showing affection. When males hug each other, they will often accompany a shake with a brief hug and patting on the back. Touch seems to be a very important and meaningful thing in romantic attraction, but our society seems to suppress this inclination in public and between male friends. Holding hands is a good way to start out the progression to more intimate touching with a potential love partner.


Rapport: When people are in the “zone” together, their body language mimics one another. To artificially create a sense of oneness, just roughly copy the other person's body language and rhythm. But it won't work if the other person is being defensive. Nobody's going to get a ruler to measure how close you actually are, and it only works if the other person doesn't realize what you're doing, otherwise they would think you were mocking them.

Eye Contact: EYE CONTACT IS IMPORTANT! If you don't feel comfortable with it, get over it as soon as possible! Perhaps you could start by watching YouTube videos, and seeing how long you can make yourself look at the other person's eyes, and then start incorporating it into regular conversation.
Refusing eye contact is considered a sign of timidity and dishonesty, so you must always include it in conversations. If you're the dude in a romantic relationship, your eye contact must always last longer than your girl's. In conversation, the listener locks eye contact more than the speaker. It is only really necessary 1/3 of the time in most cases, but having more can create a sense of intimacy. Staring continuously is a bad thing, so if your partner starts to shy ever more away form eye contact, you should do the same until he/she quits doing that.

There is a trick you can use to get a rough idea about what the other person is thinking. People often look to the corners of their eyes when they are thinking about something, and some patient researchers somewhere figured out that the direction they look often corresponds to subject matter. UP: something visual, SIDE: something auditory, DOWN: something internal, LEFT: remembering something, RIGHT: creating something. I have noticed that some people who philosopihize on youtube look an awful lot more to their lower right than normal people do, and that women who seem attracted to me often look nervously up to the right. People generally favor one sense over another. For instance, a visually oriented person might say, “I see what you mean,” whereas an auditory person might say, “I hear ya,” and a more sensitive person might say, “I know how you feel.” So using the same types of verbs they do may make it easier to get them feeling as though you are forming a deeper connection. This wasn't one of the options offered in the book I read describing this, but I have noticed that I nearly always use the verb “think” rather than “feel,” “see,” or “hear.” I am curious to know whether other aspies are like this as well. When people say “Opposites attract,” they are often referring to opposition of favored sense. People who get along well together nearly always share interests, otherwise they'd have difficulty reaffirming the value of their partner's emotions.


I think this is about everything of value that I know in condensed form. All else is practice.

You just reminded me of one of the serious conflicts between AS and ADD.

Social skills are too complex.

ADD would never allow me to weed through that much information and make any useful sense out of it.

I find the part before the advice more interesting. I tend to look away when I see negative emotion if I recognize it as such and find it hard to keep looking at someone.

By BIOS I think I meant CPU. I feel kind of stupid. I always get words confused

"I see this guy with arms crossed, leaning backward in the boardroom, whilst today's moderator paces back and forth scowling, yet seems to be telling some kind of jo- SQUIRREL!! !! !! !!"

Seriously though, I really wish I could process that much information. The way my mind works though, I really have no choice but to "wing it." I'm actually amazed at how much I've been able to fake just doing that, but it's draining and has taken its toll over all these years. Now I see breakdowns like yours and its very revealing why it has been so exhausting.

Hi, ShamelessGit, thanks a ton for sharing.
*Yes, most NTs will be annoyed if you avoid eye contact, but they might be even more annoyed if you stare into their eyes non-stop. I notice that many NTs focus on my lips rather than my eyes during conversations.
*Oh gosh, no wonder some people assume that I sound angry when I'm perfectly happy. My voice is rather low-pitched and my pitch tends to go lower and lower regardless of my subject matter.

Actually I was just thinking that it would be cool if a NT would review this and say if I made any mistakes. I don't have any way of knowing. Trying to figure this stuff out on your own would be like if you were trying to learn a foreign language in a class without instruction, and the only thing you had to work off of was your grade at the end of each test (which you took daily), which in its self would be hard to interpret because the score and comments would be given in the foreign language.