Can Aspies read facial expressions?

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I wonder if aspie-people can read facial expressions (like smile or frown) when looking at people's faces. can they understand facial expressions in cartoon characters if not in real people, too?

I was tested for reading facial expressions. I had a very low score.

as long as their facial expressions are written in words with a marker pen on their face.
otherwise they are a maze of furrowed wrinkles that mean nothing but skin contortion in my mind.

Yes and no.
I can see facial expressions pretty well, probarbly better than the average NT, but i cant figure out what they are supposed to mean if my life depended on it.

I have done several tests as well. i was 100% accurate in determining neutral faces (no false positives or negatives), but placing the correct signal/emotion on a non-neutral face? 30% on a good day...

If someone is laughing I read that as happy or as them finding something funny. If someone is crying I read that as sad or in pain. Generally though that's the only stuff that's really clear to me.

Part of the problem is that any one expression can (a) look different on different faces and (b) can mean lots of different things and I don't know how to tell which thing is meant. I would prefer a visual and spoken language where there is a one to one mapping of meaning to verbal of facial expression. Then to would be easy to figure this stuff out.

I can, to a degree, understand facial expressions people make if I spend time and apply logic to decoding their expression.

I can read happy faces and sad faces and I know laughing means happy. I had no idea I could have difficulty in them until I saw my therapist and after doing some reading online because I have noticed facial expressions and not understand why the person had that look. I also have looked back in my childhood and remember the facial expressions I had seen but I didn't know they had a meaning. I think the reason why I might have passed as a child for facial expressions is because they were only showing me simple ones and the test was only aimed for kids and I was a kid then and I knew simple ones then like happy and sad and scared. Give me adult ones then I might have trouble like I always do online but there is no context behind the expression on the online tests so I wonder how well NTs would do on them too because I don't know if the tests are just a bunch of crap.

Of course I know when people laugh, they can also be laughing as in laughing at you or laughing because they are shocked or embarrassed or because they are nervous and that gets very confusing because not all laughing means happy and that they thought something was funny so how do you tell between all these laughter? Even my mom couldn't explain it to me but agreed it's confusing. I thought she maybe had trouble with it too so I asked and she said she didn't have AS so I took it as "no" and she was only saying it is confusing for me, not confusing for her too. Also smiling can be laughing because I have smiled before only to be told I was laughing.

Yes I can read that face in the OP's picture, it's a smiley face and smiley means happy.

I can, kind of...
I think it's different from person to person.
A lot of people with autism (probably the most people with autism) have trouble with reading faces.
But thankfully I have quite an easy time with it.

When I was obsessing over animation I did a lot of research on emotional expression and learned a lot of simple rules breaking it down. Despite this I'm still below average, although not by a huge margin. If anyone wants to get better at reading emotion then I can definitely recommend facial animation tutorials.

I learned about facial expressions from watching television and making the logical connections from people's reactions and stuff, I can obviously read them when staring at pictures it's not hard to assign the right thing when you have some time to process it but in fluid exchanges and in the physical realm I can't really make quick judgements and analysis and I don't really look at folks faces too much so I am not great at figuring stuff out when it happens in real time. I literally don't KNOW how to make certain facial expressions as I don't really use my face much when conversing as it's too complex a device to program and I think it expends too much energy, if you use the right words and actions to back them up you shouldn't need to be overly expressive in da countenance!

I can read these expressions:

I think most Aspies struggle at reading facial expressions, but I've proven to myself and to others that I can read facial expressions from instinct.

..." Smiling Faces Sometimes " ~ The Undisputed Truth !

I wonder if aspie-people can read facial expressions (like smile or frown) when looking at people's faces. can they understand facial expressions in cartoon characters if not in real people, too?

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I can, at least when they are exaggerated. I'm not sure about more subtle expressions though, i often find myself confused by what people want.

I can understand basic facial expressions, like what EzraS posted.

Simple and exaggerated ones.

I find I can read a facial expression better if I can hear their voice, what they're talking about and if they actually tell me what they're feeling but looking at an image of a face is near impossible unless it's 100% obvious that they're sad, happy or mad. Crying and laughing is really similar to me, I need to see tears in order to differentiate.