"Fooled" myself into thinking I am socially-smart?

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So....... I'm an un/self-diagnosed Aspie at the moment, and have just read most of Tony Attwood's The Complete Guide to AS, as well as watching a few [dozen] videos online.

Basically, my question is about intellectual versus intuitive social skills in a person. I'm fairly certain I'm an Aspie, yet I can't remember ever being horrible at reading facial cues, or other's emotions... So do all Aspies not have to be bad at this sort of thing, or do some get so good at reading faces/voices/emotions that they can "fool" themselves later in life when they finally suspect AS? As in my intellectual knowledge base of social cues is so good/fast from observing people that I can't even know it's not intuition like in NT's?...
I ask, obviously, because not only are those types of scores are not Aspie-ish (though RDOS, AQ, etc., all say I have AS), but they seem to be (statistically significant) higher than even those of NT's! I find this very perplexing. Any thoughts?
*One final question/thought: when I watch TV comedies alone, whether they be reruns or new to me, if I kind of "zone out" "intellectually" but am still actually watching and listening to the show, I won't laugh, or even notice/care if I'm supposed to. When I watch comedies with others, this doesn't ever happen, and I can get jokes/tell jokes quite well. As a child, my mom told me I tried really hard for a really long time to be funny but it took forever to be funny... Is this related to intellectual social knowledge vs. intuitional instinct?

•Emotional IQ: 59

•Faces & Voices Quiz:
>Score: 86.0% in 5.3 seconds. Faces: 84.0%. Voices 88.0%.
[Avg. ASD male score: 65.8% in 9.3 seconds. Faces: 72.4%. Voices: 59.1%.]
[Avg. suspected ASD males: 70.6% in 12.0 sec. Faces: 73.1%. Voices: 68.1%.]
[Avg. NT males: 76.5% in 13.8 sec. Faces: 75.8%. Voices: 77.1%.]
•Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (Revised, Adult):
Score: 29/36
An avg. score for this test is 26.2, or 21.9 for an adult with AS/HFA.

I'm diagnosed and I can read facial expressions. For a diagnosis, it's not just relevant whether you can read them on others faces, but equally whether others can read your face. I don't project facial expressions well, which means that others (non-autistics) can't read *my* face.

Thumbs up ^^^. It took me some hard therapy to learn to damper my movements and facial expressions.

Oh, and most of us can read basic emotions just fine. It's the subtle stuff in-between the smiles and movements - the subtext - that we don't understand.

Well, there are a few theories about why people with AS struggle with facial expressions that I have seen.

1. The AS individual simply cannot recognize them because overly detailed processing fails to comprehend the face as the whole.

2. The AS individual can recognize them intellectually but struggles to process them in real time due to incorrect prority given to that channel of information. I.e. in a real life conversation the A.S. individual is too tuned in to e.g. the content of the communication, or the way the other persons hair looks, and fails to register any emotional response during the interaction.

3. The AS individual is less likely to convert phenomena in the world into mental symbols, but rather processes some sensory data as is. In other words, the image of someone smiling is less likely to immediately fire off the "smile" pattern in the AS brain, they are more likely to just see a person with their lips upturned. It may take a few moments for the AS person to recognize this common pattern as a smile.

4. The AS individual is hyper-sensitive to the emotional state of others, is overwhelmed and can't respond appropriately.

5. The AS individual does not naturally make eye contact. This failure to look at the face, especially the eyes, results in a failure to pick up facial expressions during social interactions.

So you see, its complicated. There is much more to AS than just "can't read facial expressions". Many people on here claim to be able to. Many people on here claim not to be able to. Many people are somewhere in the middle.

There is no "all" to anything (do all aspies have...?)
An "absence" of a symptom (unseen or unidentified) does not mean it's not there. Stimming is an excellent example of this.
ASD is a spectrum of dozens of spectrum symptoms, meaning people are likely to have different combinations of symptoms and each symptom may be subtle or intense. Imagine each symptom having a scale of 1 to 100.
How many combinations is that?

Don't worry too much about lack of noticed/identified symptom(s) as proof of total absence of ASD.
Here's two things maybe to look at.
1 - What symptoms do you have that rise to a fairly intense level that are not better explained by something else.
2 - Do any of these symptoms (or combination) significantly adversely affect any of your daily life activities.

If you think your answer is yes to both of these questions then I'd advise trying to find ways to minimize their impact.
To look for those answers anywhere you can identify possible answers, regardless diagnostic titles.
You don't need anyone else's approval of any type of diagnoses to engage in self improvement.
IMO.