When I was a child in preschool I was diagnosed with Autism. I had trouble recognising emotions. One doctor warned my mother that it’d be unlikely that I’d make more than 1 or 2 friends in my life.
I started “early intervention” pretty soon after. For years I was drilled once a week on flash cards of cartoon faces expressing different emotions. And eventually I guess it stuck because I’m pretty excellent at picking up emotions these days.
I still have major trouble if I can’t see the face. Laughing and crying sound very similar to me. Now I’m actively thinking about it, I don’t think I pick up much with body language. Unless it is cliche level obvious like curling over in pain. But, I honestly don’t know if that is something that people can see??
However, when I am looking at a face and listening to the content of speech I’d say I am now extremely accurate at determining emotions. Especially in people I am close to as I have a larger bank of information I am able to predict on.
I don’t want to say I am better than most people, because I don’t know, and there is that once bias that I forget the name of but it’s the one where in coples both partners claim to start about 70% of the fights and do 70% of the cleaning.
However, I can sometimes just, tell what people are thinking/going to say. I’d assign a 25% probability that the early intervention had some effect on my predicting of emotions. Purely because as a child I had to actively and consciously guess the feelings of these flashcards.
This to me is amazing and so exciting!
When I was a child in preschool I was diagnosed with Autism. I had trouble recognising emotions. One doctor warned my mother that it’d be unlikely that I’d make more than 1 or 2 friends in my life.
I started “early intervention” pretty soon after. For years I was drilled once a week on flash cards of cartoon faces expressing different emotions. And eventually I guess it stuck because I’m pretty excellent at picking up emotions these days.
I still have major trouble if I can’t see the face. Laughing and crying sound very similar to me. Now I’m actively thinking about it, I don’t think I pick up much with body language. Unless it is cliche level obvious like curling over in pain. But, I honestly don’t know if that is something that people can see??
However, when I am looking at a face and listening to the content of speech I’d say I am now extremely accurate at determining emotions. Especially in people I am close to as I have a larger bank of information I am able to predict on. I don’t want to say I am better than most people, because I don’t know, and there is that once bias that I forget the name of but it’s the one where in coples both partners claim to start about 70% of the fights and do 70% of the cleaning. However, I can sometimes just, tell what people are thinking/going to say. I’d assign a 25% probability that the early intervention had some effect on my predicting of emotions. Purely because as a child I had to actively and consciously guess the feelings of these flashcards.