Published on 12, July, 2020
I've been here before a couple of times, but keep coming across this idea that somehow eye contact is just something people on the spectrum failed to learn and can somehow be conditioned to resolve.
One of the problems is how do you know when eye contact isn't happening. So many people on the spectrum resolve having the deficiency pointed out to them over and over by looking at another part of the face. I uselessly and pointlessly look at mouths - and am told I appear to have good eye contact!
How do you tell if someone isn't directly making eye contact? I suggest it is quite hard to verify.
Also what is eye contact? I ask this particularly because some people on the spectrum feel they do have good eye contact. But if it isn't coming naturally how do they determine what is good eye contact?
My understanding is that making eye contact is signalling to others that you relate to them, or respect them, or obey them. It is read as a sign of loyalty or aquiescence by the recipient. So people who don't make good eye contact are seen as hostile, deceitful or deviant.
But aside from that, it isn't the eye contact that's important surely? It's the attention to other people's faces to understand how facial expressions qualify the spoken word, or reveal a person's true intentions. (Also it is about what facial expressions the person on the spectrum conveys for others to read, which may be ambiguous or not easily read if the face is often averted).
The point about eye contact/facial expression recognition is that people on the spectrum miss out on social cues, and are much more literal in the interpretation of spoken languge because they don't pick up on the qualifications conveyed by facial expression.
Therefore they do poorly at social interfacing, and lack social referencing (the feed back non autistic people get from social engagement).
Having stated the underlying difficulties, I don't think it is correctable. You can learn something about the meanings of facial expressions (hence all those social stories pictures), but it is no way as efficient as doing it instinctively. And what the scientists forget is that people on the spectrum are not only not reading it properly they are not conveying non-verbal information correctly.
So it does alarm me when I see yet again some 'professional' talking about lack of eye contact as if it is something to be cured.
Isn't it time the basics of autism (rather than just the triad of impairments) were properly understood?
Hi Longman,
Your post intrigued me - as a fellow "mouth-watcher", the way you summarise your experience chimes with my own.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you mention 'playing a role' - i.e. that it has an awful lot to do with the degree of predictability/ambiguity of a situation, and the amount of 'cognitive load' resulting from uncertainty.
In formal situations, life is much simpler - the roles of "talker", "listener", "questioner", "answerer", "dominant", "supplicant" etc. are pretty clearly defined, and there are fewer surprises. There are relatively clear rules defining what constitutes "appropriate behaviour".
This means that we can easily bring to bear everything we have learned from previous experience. Some of that learning might even have been sub-conscious - i.e. over the decades, we just conditioned ourselves to give a cursory glance at another person's face, and go "Mmmm" every once in a while, simply because 90% of the time, we got a better outcome that way (and our keen observational skills noticed other folks doing the same, even if we don't quite know why they were doing it.)
In a less formal setting, knowledge from previous experience etc. is much more difficult to apply - the "roles" that each person plays are constantly shifting, and several people may be competing for attention at every pause in the conversation. Far fewer assumptions can be made about what another person might be wanting or expecting, and judging the appropriate level of assertiveness is much more difficult.
Simply, there's just so much more cognitive load - so many more possibilities to compute! Meanwhile, the "NTs" that surround us have their handy "instincts", which allow them to short-cut past all of that complexity - they can just "do" without all that cumbersome "working out" before they look/speak/act.
This, of course, explains the "social exhaustion" that is such a common symptom reporeted here. Thinking really does burn calories, and we can't relax for a moment in case we commit some unintended faux-pas.
I quite often find that the whole subject of conversation has changed several times while I'm stuck in a kind of "analysis paralysis" - and all of that time, I haven't been paying attention to where I was looking. my posture etc. (or of those around me) I think that, even if we're not aware of it, this must contribute to a form of "performance anxiety" that strikes at precisely those times when we're supposed to be able to relax and "just be ourselves" (Oh, how I hate that phrase - my behaviour when alone is neither dangerous nor "perverted", but I doubt that being the "real me" would truly be appreciated out in "polite society"!)
I find that the most irritating aspect of this is that almost any kind of "shy" behaviour is so often interpreted as insincerity. Plenty of experiments have shown that most people are absolutely hopeless at judging whether they are being lied to, yet are hugely over-confident in their ability to do so - basing this almost entirely on social cues which are signs of stress or anxiety, not insincerity. This is especially ironic considering that AS folks are supposedly less inclined to mislead than the average person.
Yet there may be a "silver lining". The very social cues that we're "missing out on" are precisely the ones that politicians and sales people use to manipulate their audience. By concentrating on verbal content and actions, we are likely better (if slower) judges of character than we might think - better than the average "NT", even.
Maybe that's preciely why there's so much emphasis put on mastery of eye-contact - they're afraid that they can't control us so easily!! (Wishful thinking, I know - but it's a comforting dream.)
I also have a little theory of my own regarding "mouth-watching". People are inclined to see whatever it is that they expect to see, as shown by many psychology experiments. So maybe, even if our gaze is a little "off target", we're close enough for the other person's ego to compensate - they want to be the centre of attention, so their brain compensates for our slight "error", and they perceive that we made eye-contact when we didn't really!!
Best wishes.