Smiling?

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Do Aspergic/autistic children laugh/smile less than their neurotypical peers ? For those diagnosed as children-did you laugh/smile as a child?

I wasn't diagnosed as a child, but my dad was always telling me to "cheer up". I never understood as I didn't feel "uncheered" so didn't know how to "cheer". He must have said it many times over the years as it's an abiding memory.

I wasn't dxed as a child either but I do remember being told by various people to smile. It used to make me frown.

Lol I was/am the opposite. I smiled all the time, I still do even when upset or angry. I always have been told I am really cheerful but I honest to god have no idea how to show anything else.

Apparently, I did not. I was always told I needed to smile more. That it took fewer muscles to smile than it did to frown (than how come it hurt my face when I smiled?) And that when I smiled in pictures, you could tell I was autistic because I had this "look" in my eye and a fake smile. I remember having a neutral expression most of my life and when I stopped pulling fake smiles in my school pictures and just had a neutral expression, those ended up being some of my mom's favorite pictures of me. But no, I did not smile much as a kid. It wasn't because I wasn't happy.

^^^ I'd forgotten that. Smile for the camera. I always hated doing it and ended up looking like a deranged vampire.

I smile sometimes, but have been told that my smile looks really odd. Most of the time, I think my face looks really sad.

Nowadays I feel I look like a refugee from a village idiot contest or one of those extreme psychiatric cases when I smile .

I've never smiled much, and usually it's been forced. Always been "too serious".

I never smiled when I was a child.
And when I first arrived in the UK for my studies, I noticed that British students like to smile at each other a greetings. Something that's not present in Hong Kong's students (where I'm originally from)

So I picked up this smiling habit.

When I returned to Hong Kong, I find that people get really happy when I smile at them, and that this smiling makes me a more likable person than I originally was.

I guess I'm the odd one out. I was told I smiled too much, but that was because it made me look "special needs" as a kid, according to my mom. I never stopped, though. I play a weird game in public, where I smile at as many people as I can get to make eye-contact with me and "win" if I get them to smile back. Really not an Aspie kind of game, and it's strange because I'm terrible at both maintaining eye-contact and smiling on command. Still, it's an interesting way to learn about people. Teenage girls hate to be smiled at, I've found. Even as a little kid, smiling at one would earn me a heated glare. Middle-aged women are 50/50. Men just don't make eye-contact all, maybe because I'm a young girl. But boys are the most interesting. They have some truly dramatic reactions to eye-contact, though I don't smile at them for fear of giving them the wrong idea. I once made eye-contact with a boy and he immediately apologized and ran off. The single best reaction, though, has to have been from an older man in a library. I was down the aisle from him, and he turned to look at me at the same moment I glanced at him. The color drained out of his face, and he just whispered in horror, "Oh, no." Humans are so strange.