Metta
New Member
Do you think there’s any similarity between someone on the spectrum trying to interpret emotional cues, and a person trying to judge how attractive someone else is (to other people on average) if they are not sexually attracted to that gender?
For example, how should a heterosexual man go about most accurately judging the average perceived attractiveness of a another man? Maybe they would do their best to be systematic, learning to recognize attractiveness attributes, how much weight to give them, and form a sort of rule based system.
I’ll never be able to truly know my son’s full experience as he lives it, being a high functioning person on the spectrum. But I constantly try my best to understand, just like a friend might try to understand how another close friend feels, however imperfectly that would be. Sometimes I try to think of analogies like this to put it in perspective.
My son does reasonably well at interpeting basic unambiguous emotions, but any subtlety can get difficult. After someone in the room talks, he might quietly ask me, is that guy making a joke or really angry? To improve his skills, he takes courses to understand body language.
As a personal experiment, I started trying to judge attractiveness of a gender I’m not sexually attracted to using famous actors, and then asking others opinions to try and see how good I could get at it.
It was surprising to me that I seemed to share similar challenges with my son’s efforts at emotional judgements. With practice I became fairly proficient, and could usually come within a point or two on a ten point scale, compared to scores from judges attracted to that gender.
However, I had to use a lot of rules and hueristics, and couldn’t rely much on intuition. I was often totally blind to certain subtleties that seemed obvious to others. It could take me minutes to form my judgement, while others were able to glimpse someone for only a second yet still often easily surpass my accuracy.
Do you see any similarities in these challenges, or does it not sound the same at all in your experience?
For example, how should a heterosexual man go about most accurately judging the average perceived attractiveness of a another man? Maybe they would do their best to be systematic, learning to recognize attractiveness attributes, how much weight to give them, and form a sort of rule based system.
I’ll never be able to truly know my son’s full experience as he lives it, being a high functioning person on the spectrum. But I constantly try my best to understand, just like a friend might try to understand how another close friend feels, however imperfectly that would be. Sometimes I try to think of analogies like this to put it in perspective.
My son does reasonably well at interpeting basic unambiguous emotions, but any subtlety can get difficult. After someone in the room talks, he might quietly ask me, is that guy making a joke or really angry? To improve his skills, he takes courses to understand body language.
As a personal experiment, I started trying to judge attractiveness of a gender I’m not sexually attracted to using famous actors, and then asking others opinions to try and see how good I could get at it.
It was surprising to me that I seemed to share similar challenges with my son’s efforts at emotional judgements. With practice I became fairly proficient, and could usually come within a point or two on a ten point scale, compared to scores from judges attracted to that gender.
However, I had to use a lot of rules and hueristics, and couldn’t rely much on intuition. I was often totally blind to certain subtleties that seemed obvious to others. It could take me minutes to form my judgement, while others were able to glimpse someone for only a second yet still often easily surpass my accuracy.
Do you see any similarities in these challenges, or does it not sound the same at all in your experience?