I'm one of those people who believes that with careful observation he can discern the feelings of others better than the average NT. I know there are others, mostly women, who believe the same. Researchers believe they're wrong because they don't score especially well on tests for it. I think the researchers are wrong.
Some years ago a friend who was studying art history showed me a picture of a painting. It showed the painter's mistress pointing at the ground. He went "Look at her face. That's pure lust." I looked at it and saw something different. She wanted him to answer a question. Now if you see somebody's attempt to exhaustively list all emotions, no matter how long it is, you will not see "demanding an answer to a question." I thought it was a bit strange that that was what popped into my mind, but that's what I saw. About twenty years later, an art history researcher studying the painting decided to look into the gesture she was making. He went to the part of Italy where the painter had lived 400 some years earlier and asked the locals what the gesture meant. They told him she was demanding he make a decision. The painter's mistress was known to have wanted him to leave his wife at the time. I guess I hit the bull's eye.
In an online test for recognizing emotions there was a picture of several people at a bus stop and the question was, what was the woman looking away from the others feeling. It looked to me like she didn't want to be there. Of course, that wasn't one of the possible answers provided, so I picked the emotion most compatible with not wanting to be in some place, which was boredom. It didn't quite fit, but none of the others fit any better.
Then the test posited a conflict scenario to go with the picture and offered another set of possible emotions. My preferred answer was still that she didn't want to be there, but that wasn't offered and neither was boredom. So I chose anxiety. It didn't look quite right, but nothing else really did either.
I think my mediocre score on the test was at least partly the result of me seeing expressions and postures in terms of what the person is probably thinking or most likely to do next. Of course, it makes sense that I would do that if my ability at recognizing emotions is based on associating expressions with behaviors rather than intuitively copying others emotions and feeling them.
Does anybody else out there do this?
27 Feb 2013, 3:37 pm
