Reading Emotions

When I watch television, I’m always looking for clues and information about human interaction. I prefer sitcoms to soap operas. Soaps tend to be more about emotional tension and conflict and I don’t like conflict. I avoid it wherever I can. I think this is linked to my anxiety. Dr Amen says people who suffer from anxiety avoid conflict in order to keep their stress levels from rocketing.

Sometimes I can be watching a television programme, and I think I’ve got what’s going on and then I’ll watch the same episode a while later and see things I never noticed before. I suppose everyone gets this, even NT people don’t notice everything the first time. I think it’s the kind of things I don’t notice at first that’s different, like the emotional nuances and relationships between characters, and the fact that I go on not noticing for the first, second, third and fourth time - and beyond.

I like watching the Golden Girls. I have the first three episodes on DVD. I watch them over and over. The initial sparkle has gone but I still get enjoyment from watching them. The other day I watched the first episode from series one. I hadn’t seen it for about a month probably. When I watched it this time, I suddenly saw it, totally differently to how I’d seen it before. The actresses looked to be behaving differently with each other, I guess because they didn’t know each other as well. There were less pauses in the script, less non verbal interaction. It looked very different to the episodes that came after. And I wondered why I didn’t notice this before.

There is one scene from a later episode, that is another example of this. Blanche and Dorothy are playing cards, Dorothy’s mother (Sophia) is standing by Blanche giving her hints about which card she should put down. I know this because Dorothy objects to it. But if it had been a real situation I’m not sure if I would have noticed because it never clicked how Sophia was telling Blanche. I’ve seen the scene many times over two of three years, but it wasn’t till recently that I worked out how Sophia and Blanche were communicating with each other. Blanche would touch a card with her finger and look up at Sophia, who would either shake her head or nod. It sounds simple now I’ve got it, I wonder now why it didn’t click before.

Watching these programmes over and over probably wouldn’t be very interesting for most people, but I think I learn a lot from it. I saw a video on You Tube a while ago, of Temple Grandin giving a talk about autism. She showed the audience some research done on how autistic people watch films, and this explained for me why I miss so much information.

She showed a slide from the film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. First she asked the audience to look at the slide for a few moments, then she superimposed two lines on it. One line showed where an autistic person’s eye would go to in the image, the other represented an NT person’s eye. It was very revealing. There were three figures in the image, Elizabeth Taylor was standing facing the camera, and then there were two men, one with his back to the camera and the other standing side on. The autistic line showed that the autistic person looked first at Elizabeth Taylor’s mouth, wandered a little around that area and the moved in the direction of the man she was facing. I was really surprised, this was nearly exactly what I had done, I think my eye did wander around her face for a bit longer, and I think I glanced up at the third figure. But this was nothing in comparison to the NT individual whose eyes had been dashing between all three figures at what must have been breakneck speeds.

Well, I thought to myself, no wonder I don’t notice all these exchanges that go on between people. I’m not looking hard enough. Perhaps that’s the wrong way of putting it. I do look, very hard, but I’ve been looking in the wrong way. I’ve always thought if I looked hard enough at someone’s face I will eventually find what I need to know about what they’re thinking or feeling. This is wrong of course, I need to be looking at where their eyes go and the other people around them. I’m not sure I can do this though. If I start moving my eyes around like that NT person in the study Temple Grandin showed us, my sight would go all blurry and I‘d lose my balance. It might be easier watching television than real life, your eyes only have to move around a smaller area, the television screen.

I think I look at people’s mouths because it helps me to know what they’re saying as I sometimes have auditory problems, especially if there are other people talking at the same time. This problem with moving my eyes about though, I’m sure has a special name. I read about it once. Autistic people often move their heads rather than their eyes to look at an object. Children do this at first, but then they learn to move their eyes about instead. Eye movements are important for making facial expressions. This could be another reason why I sometimes look expressionless.