These VPN ads really get on my nerves. I'm sure you've heard "gay pirate assassins" before, so I specifically wanted to point out tracking. The claims about tracking are false. There's a technique that advertisers use called fingerprinting, it uses the unique parts of your browser like it's type and version, your screen size, accessibility options, fonts you have, among many other things. This allows them to build a unique profile to cross reference even if you're not signed in, and yes, even if you're on a different network, like a public hotspot or a VPN.
*Braininproc* (brain inner processing): Emotion appears when analizing some facts. Feels like overthinking pain but with brain emptiness and inability to think. Feels like someone is using feeler's brain and you suffer because of their thinking ):
I remember when I was a kid my mom and sister would constantly acuse me of lying because they thought my flat affect meant I was hiding something. When they made these acusations I would become nervous and embarassed under pressure and they took this as further proof of my duplicity. You can imagine how frustrating it was for me as a child to be distrusted this way.
Ughhh i know exactly what you mean. I had to get good at masking and scripting just to like...get through conversations with my mom too. And other people. It made you feel....wrong..like something was wrong with you bc youre just not doing it right.
This happened a lot to me, too 😑 Also, adults would often just ignore me when I would report about pain or injuries (unless I had blood all over my clothes or something similarly gross going on).
I'm annoyed at body language "experts" who read people avoiding eye contact as "lying". From my limited experience it is always those that stare you in the eye or even trying to get into your personal space are liars. It's like the cheapest manipulation to try and sell their "honesty". They also make big "puppy" eyes that look more like bulging "I accidentally peed myself" eyes
Context almost always matters, given that the same movement or expression can mean multiple things. People may divert their eyes when they're feeling ashamed, anxious, sad, scrutinized, thoughtful, or overstimulated, depending.
Thing is that there are no actual consistent tells in real life that someone is lying, this has been extensively studied, absolutely nobody can tell when a stranger is lying with any degree of accuracy unless it is an extremely obvious lie where you know its false even without seeing someone's expression. The idea that we can tell lying from body language or facial expression is confirmation bias.
This seems like one of those things where people seem to observe this behavior as the most common, or an average, and then that becomes the norm. Even though there's an insane number of possibilities to it.
That only catches bad liars and people who are anxious when being interrogated whether they are telling the truth or not. Good liars are so used to lying they don’t show signs of anxiety.
@@robokill387A big factor is whether the lie is consequential. If someone is lying to avoid a very serious consequence, they might show more “tells”. The thing is, “tells” can be false positives for people who are nervous or afraid of being falsely accused, even when are telling the truth. As for little white lies that are not of much consequence, these are not going to be easy to detect. Especially white lies that are so routine and automatic that they hardly require thought.
more of an ADHD thing but: Time Nausea - the dizzy feeling you get when you're trying to manage time blindness but your brain oscillates too rapidly between boredom and anxiety.
oh so that is what is making unable to human at times. i need to have a snack to get me to do the thing but then i forget what the thing originally was and then i lose track of time and i need to constantly be with proximity or my notebook and my planner and a clock oh and of course my fidgets. somehow i manage for the most part and then the cycle starts up again the next day.
While flat affect is common, some autistic people like me are highly expressive, but what we express is 'overly intense or unusual.' Nothing wrong with talking about flat affect, it's the most common- I just thought I'd throw in that there's a secret bonus way to fail at Socially Acceptable Expression.
Ooo, this stuff is why nobody considered autism except one guy who pinned the idea because of something I had said that was actually because I was being bullied!
I oscillate between the two. I’m less likely to be overly expressive now, though, after some people attacked me in front of everyone in the room for making a face I didn’t know I made
It has always baffled me how confidently allistic people will assume what I'm feeling, though for most of my life its been more of "why does basically everyone feel so sure that they know my thoughts?"
Same and now looking back, few things make "Everyone has trouble reading emotions." so clear as when I was a kid and my peers bothered me while I was cowering, growling, and hissing until I reached meltdowns.
You know...i just realized that all my years on tumblr and in fandom, with other extremely ND people (especially autistic and adhd folks) meant we just...came up with specific emotions. Like being hellbrained (unable to stop thinking or talking about something even if it is very distressing) or skrunkly ( looking kinda fucked up but in a cute, charming way that elicites endearment). I rly like a lot of those words tho so im taking them. Anyway, i had the realization that allistics were also bad at reading emotions when I was working at a hotel, and everyone thought i didnt care about anything or thought i was better than everyone else, whoch led to me getting horribly bullied and shunned by my coworkers. It took me asking one of them what the hell i did, why were they so mean? And they got real uncomfortable, and then explained that i seemed like a know it all and thought i knew better than everyone else. Specifically because i was always asking questions, especially about why we did something. Like whay the purpose of a rule was or a policy, bc to me it seemed ridiculous to do something and not even know why. And i was lik..HUH??? i ask questions...so i can learn??? Ive never thought i knew more than you or anyone, i just like to learn about thinga and better understand them. :< And my coworker was so shocked. Like she had assumed i really was just...idk, a smart ass. She did apologize for how she had been treating me, but...ever since then i still never understood why her not understanding why /I/ did something meant like..okay time to treat him like shit?? I told them all just ASK ME what im thinking or TELL ME that you dont understand. I do!! Its not hard!!! Augh!!!!!! Abyway she stopped bullying me, but my bosses didnt. They used that and the fact i talked about like.."hey we do a lot of work here, we deserve better dont we?" As an excuse to abuse me into quitting, bc they couldnt just outright fire me for idk. Being autistic and talking about working conditions. But what a time. Jesus christ.
It's a hierarchy thing, asking question means you're questionning the legitimacy of the hierarchy because you need the rule to make sense to apply it while you're expected to apply the rule regardless of it making sense because it comes from the top. Asking question and trying to understand threatens the legitimacy of hierarchical structure so people who need to understand what they're doing end up bullied to be put back in their place. And even people who're not at the top see it as a threat because they learned to not ask question and that it's a sign of their place in the hierarchy so if someone who is supposed to be at the same level as them asks question that means they must think they're above them. It's of course very stupid, like, asking question means you don't know, you're litterally saying you know less than the other person and trying to fix that But hierarchies are very stupid in general Some rules are even arbitrary and have no purpose other than check that you're following them and not questionning them, so trying to understand those is an immediate red flag and tend to get you ostracized at lightspeed.
@@Laezar1 yeah, this is all very much true. I realized this all afterwards, and tbh? I kept doing it on purpose. At different jobs, i politely and kindly asked questions. It became a way for me to guage if this was a place i wanted to work long term or not, bc if they were gonna get all shitty over just questions, i fuckin hit da bricks. It actualy helped me find way better jobs lmao. That hotel job radicalized me as much as it traumatized me, and i was not going totake any shit sitting down anymore. But yeah i mean. Its probably why im an anarchist now. Hierarchies make no damn sense and are useless except for those on top, so fuck that.
My mother tells me a lot that I am "a know it all and think I know better than everyone else"... I never understand why. Maybe I should ask what she means. The problem being of course that describing how/why you feel something is so very hard, as this video has told us, and she has strong signs of adhd (imo and I should know I "work" around these kinds of ppl) and so is a ND person herself and probably won’t be able to tell me why she feels that way anyway. lol
It is a bit if a relief to know even neurotypical people are bad at identifying their own emotions, too. I frequently refer to a chart to find more specific words than "uncomfortable", "neutral", and "happy" to describe my emotions.
It was such a relief for me too! I knew it was important to identify emotions, and I knew other people were only able to heal from their trauma by feeling their feelings, but was struggling with it and getting very frustrated (so frustrated, in fact, that I was able to name that I was feeling frustrated). I'd been approaching it like a scientist, trying to figure it out. After reading Dr. Feldman Barrett's book, I realized I need to approach it more like a creative writing exercise.
ABA is beyond terrible. I was shocked at how extensively it was still a thing. I remember having to leave a shift at work early (theatre ushering) when one of the universities was doing the graduation thing and about half of the 500 something students were graduating with degrees in ABA specifically. I was so baffled that these people could have studied this for an entire degree and not realised how utterly vile it was.
Maybe the people who dedicated years of their lives studying for this degree specifically would have known more about it and how it has evolved from its creation than someone who just heard about it somewhere? Just a thought.
Many of them leave the profession when they realise that the autistic people who have been victims of it were right all along. It's being phased out in the EU for a reason: because Behaviourism is pseudoscience. But it's going strong in the USA cuz $$$ sorry.
@@binimbap universities still teach to medical professionals in training that people of color feel pain differently or to a lesser degree than white people. most psychiatrists think that cluster b personality disorders necessitate that you be kept sedated and away from any strong emotions lest you get overexcited and hurt someone. bigotry in medicine and academia in general is a massive problem. why would autistic people somehow be spared from experiencing medical and psychiatric abuse when literally every marginalized group is uniquely vulnerable to it??
@@Ember_Green I'm still so surprised that it's still big here in the US. Our own department of defense even did a study showing that it had minimal effectiveness, yet here we are
I didn't even know what I was feeling was unusual till my mid 20s, then I discovered what agender was and identified as agender for the next decade, then I finally understood the extend of my masculitiny in mid 30s. Yep, experiential blindness is very real.
The main benefit I got from having been a theater kid is learning to do expressions manually. I understand working retail gives you the same skill set. Occasionally freaks people out when I forget or don't bother and my affect goes flat though.
I feel this. Every now and then remembering, 'Oh yeah, I'm meant to move my face when interacting with other people.' I don't think the lockdowns helped that reaction tbh. I have quite a few memories of being repeatedy asked if I was ok while I was just vibing at some party, often with earplugs in to dampen all the noise.
Theater, saaaaame. Also memorizing scripted responses & making eye contact... I can still hear my old Broadway director yelling at me from the auditorium, "Look up! There's nothing interesting on the floor!!!!!"
I completely relate to the "flat face" issue. I'm so tired of being accused of being "angry" or having an "attitude" simply because I'm not showing an emotion. I swear I keep thinking I'm showing emotion when I'm not. It's even caused problems at work.
I mean, also, they shouldn't be getting mad at you for being angry anyway, as it's a perfectly normal and healthy emotion and not something bad in itself.
You know I don't think I had a flat affect until being bullied in school made me develop one. Some of the kids were so into bullying me that they would take anything that I was interested in and try to find ways to bully me about them. So I learned to pretend to not care about things and have a poker face so that would keep ammunition out of their hands.
2:17 I work for Whole Foods Market (grocery store owned by Amazon) and within this past year they've changed their application process to include an assessment, quizzing people on how they would respond to different situations. One example being, "would you be willing to come into work despite adverse weather?" -- They're looking for people to just say yes, but as an autistic person, I'd obviously want to know "what kind? How severe?" Because the difference between 3 inches of snow and 30 is severe. But they don't want question-askers or trouble-makers, just blind compliance, which either intentionally or unintentionally results in weeding out neurodivergence. A coworker from my previous store was unable to transfer to mine because he failed this assessment, even though he had worked for the company for 5 years. We had an internal survey where we could leave notes anonymously, where some grievances would be passed up to corporate, and I completely tore into them for this ableist change. I know my words won't make a difference, but I hope at least _someone_ read it and became as uncomfortable as I am. My attention to detail and introversion are a boon for my monotonous, precise job; to weed us out before giving us a chance is terrible.
I despise these types of questions for the same reason! I am not being provided enough information to give a proper answer. In a similar strain, I’ve found that English classes tend to have an undercurrent of “neurotypical assumption.” For example, trying to find irony. It’s difficult for me to do so when it’s not blatantly obvious, yet throughout my years of education I’ve constantly had points taken off for not being able to see it. It’s infuriating. Yet because I always did very well, no one seemed to notice I was struggling and compensating by spending nearly every hour of every afternoon on homework and practice.
Honestly I lied I researched what they wanted to hear bc I was that desperate for a job and I could never hold one due to my dyslexia and overall bad executive function to do specific tasks
The main emotion I felt during my grandpa's funeral was anxiety that I would put on the wrong facial expression. I learned as a child that the best way to put people at ease (and therefore avoid their feelings escalating) was to smile, so I spent the whole time monitoring my face to make sure it didn't smile, instead of, you know, grieving.
You don't even need studies to prove that reading facial expressions or other nonverbal queues is BS. It's obvious in the miscommunication that frequently occurs among those who think you can. People often infer what is not implied because of projection. They think "if I said this I would mean this" or "if I had that facial expression in response to that it would mean this"; thus, that must be the case with this other person. Relationships are destroyed by people carrying around grudges over perceived slights that were not intended to be slights at all. All totally avoidable if we communicate clearly and ask for clarification when we are unsure what was meant.
Rubby. This comes from my cousin (I don't think she was autistic) who loved to feel things she deemed nice under her fingers. She found it calming. So rubby refers to any material she liked to rub. I showed up one day wearing a velvet shirt, and upon hugging me she commented happily on my "rubby shirt". I love some of these terms here! Also, thanks for pointing out more horrible history to me. I'm now even more disgusted by conversion therapy, knowing it comes directly from torturing autistic children. (I really do enjoy learning historical things.)
Artphoria: when you get so focused on making a piece of art that you stop caring about the rest of the world, and for just a moment, a glimmer of joy and pride shines through the clouds of your generalized anxiety and low self esteem 😊
When we were 13, my friend asked me for advice on how to be more expressive after another friend mistook her flat affect for a lack of care. I explained to her my process of making expressions in the mirror, naming those expressions and thinking of times I'd seen that word used in books so I had examples of situations in which it would be appropriate to make them, making expressions near a mirror and then looking in the mirror to make sure they still looked right, and then memorizing how the tension in my face felt so during the day I could monitor myself to make sure I was making an appropriate expression. She said that was too much work for her, which supported my hypothesis that she was "bad at knowing what her face was doing" because she simply hadn't put in the same work everyone else had. I blamed this on her hippy parents who never taught her the importance of maintaining appearances or hard work and was privately glad that my parents had started "correcting" my behaviors when I was just a toddler. 14 years later, we've both had our struggles but one of us has a close, supportive relationship with her parents and one of us had a crash and burn breakdown from the fatigue of masking for decades. Bet you can guess which one is which.
There's a sad irony to things like 42:35 where *we're* the ones said to have problems feeling/expressing emotions and yet the people who are supposedly "experts" in emotion don't seem to display any regret at the consequences of their actions.
This reminds me of a quote from one of my favorite games, The World Ends With You. "Everyone has their own little internal world -- a secret garden only they can enter. Each world follows its own internal logic -- individuality. And the logic of one world means nothing in another. ...Understanding other people isn't hard, Neku. It's impossible." This quote has always stuck with me, for before my autism diagnosis. I'm beginning to wonder if this video is giving me a clue as to why
When I was a kid, I hated receiving gifts coz people would literally get angry at me for not showing the emotions they wanted to see. I felt all the things but they didn’t understand my emotional expressions in context. Seeing baby you in the video, I absolutely saw how excited you were coz it’s pretty much how I expressed emotions as a kid. It breaks my heart that NTs can’t see it coz it’s obvious. You were absolutely in awe! That’s why I learned to mask using over exaggerated emotional expression as a comedic buffer to deal with the double empathy problem. Like if I perform how I’m feeling in a grandiose pantomime, maybe the allistic brain can interpret it properly, coz they’re not going to ask and if I volunteer my feelings, they’ll think I’m lying coz it doesn’t match their internal projections based on their own assumptions. It’s like playing charades with aliens who are unfamiliar with my earth ways, except that they’re the standard that I’m supposed to hold myself to and try to mimic.
Yes! My mother would remind me before visiting relatives - “make sure you act surprised!” and we’d practice making happy surprised looks at each other. When I would forget, she’d get so upset… my step-grandma didn’t want me to come back and visit anymore because she thought I was ungrateful for a gift that I absolutely loved
as an autistic person i get it real often that people think they can get a read on me or how i feel and think that because i did one thing or looked a certain way i must feel a certain way. when i actually dont feel the way they think at all. but because they think body language and expressions are so universal and innate, they dismiss any of my corrections and just think im lying. its SO annoying.
New concepts: Frume: a trance-like euphoria that is both energizing and exhausting when you are in a creative flow Foconscious: a deep immersion in your environment that makes you lose your self-perception
I love this. I was too foconscious cleaning and organizing to sooth myself mentally that I forgot all other aspect related to self care, such as eating, taking a bath, etc.
Wow so many creators I like started UA-cam pretty much exactly 3 years ago. It is such a mind boggling coincidence that they all started in the spring of 2020. Such a coincidence.
i’m autistic and lack empathy, also naturally have really flat affect. i learnt how to fake emotions and tailor my personality to appease neurotypicals, but when i tell them this almost every time they’re like “that’s so manipulative” like buddy, pal, my guy, neurotypicals do the same thing but automatically 😭 i just had to learn so y’all wouldn’t bully me
On the topic of flat aspects, I remember in elementary school, a lunch lady asked what I was upset about when I was actually in a very good mood. I was confused, to say the least. Even if I wasn't smiling, I certainly was not upset. It was that moment I decided to practice facial expressions. I do wonder if it did me any good.
What's funny is, I always assumed I was a very expressive person... but when I started questioning whether I might be on the spectrum, I realized that I often become conscious of the need to form a smile at appropriate times. I think I smile autonomously, too, but there are definitely many times that a fleeting thought precedes the action when I'm around other people: "make your face smile, not too big, is this natural?" in, like, a microsecond of consciousness. Of course, when I worked in a public-facing job many years ago, I also used to get the obnoxious exhortations to "Smile!", mostly from old men. Ugh. I don't think the two are related, but honestly my memory of the facial expression thing just doesn't go back that far so maybe they are.
@@VeganAtheistWeirdo I am nearly constantly smiling, though I don't know if that is autism or just me trying to stave off depression. I went to a doctor once and my mom said that despite how bad I was doing I just kept smiling through it, I don't really do that anymore though.
My classmates used to ask me if I had emotions because of my flat affect. It hurt. I can't imagine what it must be like to hear your own mother say something like that. That's really f*cked up. It's like hearing your mother say that she doesn't really think you're a person.
REALLY looking forward to this video. A few hours ago, I (an Autistic undergrad with a special interest on neurodivergence) was invited to give a lecture about that very same topic at a center that helps Autistic ppl with high support needs. The atypical emotional responses of those people often lead their parents to think that they don't really feel emotions. The familes are often of very low income, sometimes so much so that they can't afford a table. Thus, their relative lack of knowledge on the nuances of autism is understandable, but still enourmously sad. I'll try looking for texts by nonverbal Autists about how they feel and communicate. Any suggestions?
Ok so I'm in the middle of some stuff rn but I don't want to forget to reply: I included some links to articles, blogs & videos by non-speaking autistic people in my last video. I don't know if they talk specifically about emotions, but they definitely go into their experiences. They're included in the sources document linked below this video: ua-cam.com/video/qlV27yFLRqU/v-deo.html
Elizabeth Bonker is extremely articulate and is also a non-speaker. I believe she works at 4 ALL and is their comms director. Worth Googling if she had published content similar to what you're looking for
My psychiatrist told me I am unable to read microexpressions and that's why I make other people "deeply uncomfortable" and give off "serial killer vibes" and id internalized that (I don't really make expressions at all and the few I do are subconscious and "look forced or faked") and accepted it as the reason for why I make strangers uncomfortable and after listening to this I have no clue what to think anymore or what that means about why strangers start off thinking I'm creepy or "off"
I can't believe a psychiatrist said that to you!? "Serial killer vibes"!? No. Omg. Yea, it's the double empathy problem. NT people read us wrong all the time. If you consider that emotions don't live in facial expressions, you could try other ways to make your emotions understood without forcing your face into expressions that aren't natural to you?
27:45 "...without these emotional concepts you woudln't even be able to recognise these concepts in yourself." Yeah.. about that... I'ma talk a bit and then take a break from watching. That hit me deep and hard and not in a fun way. I grew up in a family that ignored emotions for all kinds of reasons. One result of that was that I was never taught any concept of any emotion and my emotions weren't discussed. Yes, that is extreme emotional neglect and that's not the subject now. I honestly didn't know what emotions were or how to feel about anything. When our dog died, when my grandmother died, I was annoyed and frustrated with people's sadness. It's part of life as far as I was concerned. Losing and missing someone, or a loved pet, was just a part of that. You accept it and move on. I thought I might be a sociopath. Until one day, I was curious, what if I caused something I regret, by breaking something I hold dear. I would know that regret is what I should be feeling. So I broke an oversized bottle that I had one of and I could not get back or replace. I also broke my heart in the process, for science! Nah, just for me, to learn. I felt sad and powerless to reverse or fix it, and I also realized I had been sad before and I could've responded differently in situations. I realized I had lost loved ones and pets and never gave anyone the acknowledgement of their emotions. I realized that I had never acknowledged my emotions and that no one else had either. I felt alone and abandoned and I was. A lot has changed for me. I'm not alone, even when I'm by myself. I have learned to recognise and express and deal with my and other people's emotions. But that past will for the rest of my life be a part of me, along with the sadness I feel for myself and the people who were around me during my growing up. Everyone in my life and myself included have been missing out on a lot. I am not a sociopath. My emotions are valid and valuable, as am I. The love I give to people around me and the love I receive in return now could've been a part of our lives the whole time, instead of the misery and anxiety I had been feeling for all of my life. That will never change and it will always F'ing SUCK! And yeah, as you've pointed out in another video, and as therapists and scientists have shown, cognitive therapy has helped deal with it and made it easier to think back and not crumble into a useless immobile mess. I have accepted that that too is a part of who I am. But it also will always hurt. And now I'ma do some small chores for myself because I am worth the kindness of those actions and I kinda like myself
idk what to call it but: the stress you feel when you don’t want someone to know something but you can’t just say something false because it hurts to say false things
This relates mostly to my OCD, but I use the phrase "body day" for when I'm so under-stimulated I feel it in individual body parts. I'll be hyper aware of my body and have a lot of compulsions and intrusive thoughts focused on sensation or self harm. Once my friends knew what it meant, it made it easier to ask for help grounding when I need it
People were often angry at me when I apologised for something because I “didn’t look sorry at all”. And once my dad thought I was being aggressive for no reason when I was actually excited and happy. Ironic that in time my emotions have gotten much more detached but I’ve trained my expressions to “pass better” for the “appropriate situation”.
“Focus haze” when you’re looking into someones eyes to try to signal to them you’re fully engaged & listening. but then your eyes slip into your mind, and you (probably) look glazed over at this point, while staring into their eyes and they’re still talking at you, but you’re somewhere completely different. And then you have to respond to whatever it was they said! Anyone?
I don’t know how you do it. I usually get super bored with long videos where people speak at a “regular to slow” speed. But with you I’m just fully focus and engaged during the whole video. Not sure what it is but it manages to keep my adhd brain completely mesmerized 🤩
Learning more about perceptions of emotion is not only interesting but… clearing up a lot of previous experiences I had as a kid. People struggled to understand my expressions and I was often accused of lying or being rude, and I’ve recently discovered that I’m autistic. People were just working under a more complex system of social rules than I was - I would be honest, then be accused of lying because I didn’t make eye contact or struggled to put my feelings into words. I was accused of being overly dramatic because I was overwhelmed by their voices and needed them to speak to me differently. When I became friends with new people, I was very often told that before they got to know me, they thought I was really intimidating. Thank you for making this. I think it’s really validating for other autistic people, and more neurotypical people should have access to this information, so that we can all communicate more effectively. If only folks could just be upfront without so many bells and whistles about it.
I think many of us (I'm ADHD not Autistic, but I think this applies to everyone) have had the shitty experience of having someone else impose their idea of what they think we're feeling onto us. It's usually wildly over simplistic. Most typical one for me is "crying means your sad". Whereas I will regularly cry from frustration, anger, happiness, or just overwhelm. I got the giggles at my granny's funeral, as did my sisters (a group emotional outburst there). If you catch me making any face while alone in a room, there's a good chance I'm acting out a dialogue in my head and it is expressing on my face.
One thing that tends to be common in folks on the Spectrum is that they often struggle with emotional regulation. So if an autistic person is stressed due to a factor that might just be mildly irritating to their allistic friend or relative, what can come off as an unreasonable or self-centered response may just be the result of said person being so monumentally uncomfortable that they struggle to keep other people's feelings in check. It's hard to remain calm in a burning building if you are already on fire.
meltdown-onset anxiety: the anxiety felt between overwhelm and meltdown, when you know the crash is coming but can't extricate yourself from the situation and it just cascades... Anyway i finally got away to finish watching this! Love it 😊
12:16 the funniest thing about that brilliant drop of reasoning is how everyone involved was clearly obsessed with and fascinated by that type of parisian related trivia. Which is very common, as a half n' half myself I've been met with a bunch of questions or outright assignments of stereotypes I was neither familiar with nor particularly fit the description of. But I often took them on without even realising. People doubt nurture plays as significant a role as it does, often picturing explicit teachings and black and white experiences, but it's far more subtle and potent, you can be peer pressured to alter your behaviour by a description of relatives you've never met, you can be nudged to imitate someone simply by repeated exposure, it's all a big convoluted accident.
excellent video!!! and ah yeah. i remember being a very very anxious teen, regularly had panic attacks, felt like i never learned how to socialize, so i spent all the time when company was over hiding away. my dad told me he thought i was elitist and viewed myself as better than others so i didn't talk to them. very cool thing to say to a teenager struggling with severe social anxiety and self hatred lmao. people all the time read my flat affect and me hardly speaking as me being bored or mad at them or something similar. one of my biggest pet peeves is when people put words in my mouth based on what they think my expression is. they're never right. wish there was more of a culture of asking how people are feeling, and people responding with meaningful answers hahah
Thank you. A few weeks ago, I found out (had it confired by official diagnosis) that I am autistic. I'm 54, and I never knew. So many times, I have gotten frustrated because friends, coworkers, and family members would always react to other people when they were upset but never to me. I never received empathy or concern from people unless I verbally expressed my distress. I often got treated like my health concerns were no big deal or that I was lying or putting on about how bad I felt, which is so doubly frustrating because I don't like to complain about physical discomfort and have an extremely high pain tolerance. A few years ago, I did have a conversation with a long-term friend wherein she confirmed that I have a pretty non-expressive face. Your video helps me understand a lot. One of the other problems, as I see it, is the lack of empathy and concern from others contributes to the stress and distress of whatever is going on and this mounting and unrelieved stress has definitely led to meltdowns in the past. It's sad to think that my only real recourse in avoiding this in the future is to never expect others to be able to tell how I feel and show compassion without my having to ask for it, but knowing that may at least lower the stress buildup so that I can calm myself down.
Complegue (come-plea-g) - the sensation of fatigue felt upon finishing a task, especially an undesirable or otherwise delayed task. Complements: Crungetic (kruhn-jet-ick)- the feeling of anxious, nervous, or excited energy experienced while performing a task under time pressure.
PLEASE, I'd LOVE to see you make a video on the bullshit that went on with the Depp-Heard case. I've been aware of it since it first came out years ago, initially as a huge fan of Depp's work. People were so foaming at the mouth to insist Heard HAD to have done something wrong --to deserve it-- because Depp was initially claiming it was a mutually abusive relationship despite ZERO evidence for it at the time, and from the jump my take was "IF she also abused him then that's ALSO bad and they BOTH should be expected to work on those issues, HOWEVER Depp has to provide some evidence of that and right now there is literally nothing indicating she did anything to him, and a MOUNTAIN of evidence he clearly abused her, including him being abusive on camera, and accounts from coworkers about him treating others that way too." And they were all like "YOU'LL SEE, I BET YOU DON'T ACTUALLY THINK THAT WHEN HE DOES PROVE IT." And then he provided like ONE piece of evidence of her being violent and abusive in their relationship. And I was like "Alright yeah, that's fucked up, it seems like this was a theme in their relationship that went back and forth, they should both take some time to get better and make sure they don't do this again." And all of the Depp supporters, 90% of the people who were fence sitting, and half of the people who rightly initially supported Heard were like *SHE'S EVIL IT'S ALL HER FAULT EVERYTHING SHE SAID WAS LIES DEPP DID NOTHING WRONG SHE'S THE DEVIL!!!* When literally nothing changed about the pile of evidence of Depp being abusive. Just a woman reciprocated her partner's abuse and all of a sudden nothing that happened to her or that her partner did matters anymore.
enholed: the feeling of helplessness/despair/frustration/awkwardness while on hold when trying to call Adult Autism Services and find out if you're going to get that third appointment you've been waiting for. eg: "Blackcountry Heathcare NHS trust left me enholed for over three years"
Stumbled upon this video today, and I'm so happy I did. It made me realized how even I (27, AuDHD diagnosed at 10, fixated on learning about it since then. ) have spread so many misinformation about autistic people and emotions. Also, I was really surprised when you showed the video. Maybe it's just my personal experience, but to me it was immediately obvious that you were excited about the gift. You didn't take your eyes off it for one second. And the stimming and the little taps on the box. Absolutely adorable!
I liked the show Lie to Me in that one of the things the main guy constantly said was that sure you can read specific emotions but that tells you nothing about WHY that emotion is being expressed. The assumptions people make about people's emotions based on facial expressions are terrible. Love the comments on introverted Americans struggling to have jobs, you are not wrong.
I have seen a lot of coverage on UA-cam of late covering narcissism. However, it seems to me that a lot of what is considered to be identifiers for narcissistic behaviour can also be taken as identifiers for autistic behaviour, especially when divorced of context or intent. I find that many workplaces have policies which are unduly harsh for autistic adults, especially those who have not been formally diagnosed in childhood, and the discrimination between those with and without formal diagnosis in the workplace can be quite shocking. In the end, ignoring intent in policies and diagnosis just makes society increasingly more toxic for autistic individuals. It's no surprise that many autistic people don't have any interest in socialising in societies that often misunderstand and mistreat them - to the point that it's quite easy for some autistic people to develop narcissism, and essentially become the "monsters" they are often already treated as. I would be very interested in seeing a video that tackles the issue of narcissism and autism - almost every comparison video I have seen essentially others autistic people, and whilst there may be some hand-wringing and remorse regarding the hurt such assertions of narcissism can have against such individuals, they immediately dive straight back in with their assertions of behaviours that always indicate narcissism, completely ignoring intent and context...
Thank you for describing affect in more detail! I used to think I was really good at reading emotions because I'm very sensitive to affect and energy level changes. When I started finding out more about autism, I realized I just always assumed I was the cause of negative changes to affect, and then whenever I was right it stuck, reinforcing that notion. Realizing that I only understood good/bad/neutral was really eye opening and helpful, and you gave words to that understanding!
My child, who is autistic loves roller coasters. They love watching videos about roller coasters, they'll happily queue for hours to get on a roller coaster, they'll excitedly talk about going to a roller coaster for hours. They'll stim with barely contained excitement when they are about to get on a roller coaster. When they are on it, being thrown around, turned upside down, pulling g-forces you'd only normally experience in a car crash with all around them screaming in wild enjoyment and terror, my child's face is impassive. Like sitting on a park bench. At the end they'll leap off, completely buzzing and excitedly talk about the next ride they'll go on. Just because I can't see the pleasure (or fear, disgust, joy etc) does not mean its not there. One day they might get better at telling me how they are feeling. Until then it's my job to figure it out.
Omg yeah I ended up in a terrible feedback loop of feeling physically anxious and then thinking about all the reasons I might feel that way and then those things would give me anxiety, turns out eating gluten just imitates that feeling of my stomach sinking that I get when I think things are really bad. People would be like "it's all in your head," no it's in my tummy! Everything you said about how autistics need to be seeking out learning to do it...... oh dang. That SO explains the Book of Rules thing and why I'm always like "wow I wish these socialization things were spelled out to me earlier" ...OBSESSED with sparkle-brained. tempted to make it my entire personality now omg
Growing up, I was always told I lack empathy, and that that made me an inherently morally bad person. The same people who told me I was incapable of empathy mocked and belittled me for expressing empathy for fictional characters. Apropos of nothing, did you know that, in the absence of an ability to empathize, sociopaths instead project their own motives and affectations onto others? It certainly doesn't help matters that they respond with hostility whenever we emote the ways they say we're supposed to. Lovaas talked about autists literally the exact same way 18th-century colonialists talked about Pacific islanders.
I think I remember you did a similar video, the idea that all body language is universal and it's really pseudoscience. I got confused and thought this video started yesterday, I went looking at 22:00 and noticed I got the date wrong.
It was supposed to premiere yesterday but there was a mix-up with the sponsor so I had to postpone. And yes - good catch! It's a remake of my first ever video, to celebrate my 3 year UA-cam anniversary 😊
Münecats? Sorry i think it was münecats and how people just culturally do that instead it actually being "universal" and people just adopting to that in learned reaponses, well mostly. Its more about body language reading experts and bs but similar?! . Anyways that video should be good.
I have complicated feelings about autism and empathy. I have been diagnosed with autism, and (as best I can tell) I do have low empathy. I do my best to act as if I have more empathy because I believe a certain amount of empathy is morally necessary. But it is ultimately an act. I think I am a cold person who's just doing their impression of a good person.
If anything i'd say that is more admirable than someone who does it naturally, as you see the value in such an interaction and seek to use that for the benefit of others. Ethically speaking thought crimes are meaningless
Even if you believe it an act the moral choice to engage in that act should still be considered a positive. You would rather act in a way you don't necessarily feel to the benefit of other as opposed to their detriment when you have the choice.
Very important information! I had a good discussion with my mother-in-law recently about micro-expressions and the like, and the bunk research behind it. More people need to understand the non-universality of facial expressions and emotion concepts in general.
I spent so much time in fourth grade, staring at the “feelings” poster, memorizing the face-line cartoons as if they were maps. I kept a notebook of face doodles too, but I always thought it was my own failure, that I couldn’t crack the code
Thank you for the wonderful video and congrats on 3 years! I'm almost 50 and only recently been diagnosed with autism. Ever since I was a child I've been in psychiatric care because something was 'wrong' with me that needed to be 'fixed'. The part with those children really hit me hard. I never had anything that horrible happen to me, but I do know what it feels like to be taunted to the point where you just break. And then to hear them say that autistic people have no empathy is so insulting.
It's frankly incredible how hearing the word "scranch" produced that very same feeling in me almost immediately. Most often, my physical sensory stuff end up bothering my top front teeth even when the vast majority of it isn't teeth related, like my feet upon many types of carpet, and Scranch is so perfect for that feeling. Oh, and the video on the whole was really good! Felt incredibly validating and was able to put a lot of my feelings into well-researched words
The thing that always gets me about Ekman's test and others like it is that they're not showing subjects pictures of people feeling different emotions, they're showing them pictures of actors/models who have been told to make certain facial expressions.
I think this is part of why I feel so much more comfortable interacting with people online. I don't have to outwardly show my amusement or excitement or sadness or what have you, instead I can just tell people that's how I'm feeling and I'm believed; and everyone is missing a bunch of the context too, unless it's stated outright. I'm also much better at putting together context and nuance from the written word than I am from spoken things and the fact that written things give a bit more time for processing if needed since there's that delay built it in inherently (as opposed to spoken conversation that has a much more rapid flow) really helps. Interestingly enough, I was told often as a child that I was being too dramatic; usually because I'd be very quiet and sort of repress my discomfort until I no longer could and then melt down emotionally at what seemed like a very small thing (except inside, it had been this wave of emotion and reaction that was building for ages).
In online communication sometimes I can like recognize the emotion/response someone is trying to get out of me but sometimes in real space I just wouldn't be able to properly give it to them. I like that online communication lets me be more polite/engaged than I might be able to otherwise.
76 and seeking diagnosis. This video brought tears to my eyes. I’m very emotional, even empathetic. Yet so many things you said affect me deeply.During childhood my mother broke my heart by accusing me of acting when we argued. In reality it was taking everything I had to face overwhelming grief and anger. Confusion has always thrown me into a state of panic, and my mother’s rejection of me at that very moment felt like betrayal.
As someone who’s autistic and also has other disabilities, I don’t do well with tone sometimes. I personally enjoy texting or other electronic communication because you don’t have to try and gauge or assume intent. Whereas if my partner on a voice/video call says something in just a different way than usual or with an expression I didn’t expect, I have to quickly do the “is she mad? Did I miss her saying something before? What did I do wrong?” Mental gymnastics before either asking her about it (either directly or she asks me if I have a perplexed expression), or just reminding myself “hey, no, she loves me, she’s not upset, it’s ok”. It’s not her fault of course, just me worried that I’m not good enough, even though she keeps reminding me she thinks I am, or that my autism will be too much for her as it has been in the past for others, which she also reminds me won’t happen either. Anyway, sorry for the long ramble. I just saw your channel and am diving into the backlogs while on a break from schoolwork.
Not sure if it is a common thing for autistic people or just a me thing: otherwhelmed: When you anxiously see stuff accumulating on your time schedule because other people make them happen despite what have been previously decided and you know there is going to be an issue. example: friend A has a birthday party planned since months. It is scheduled for Saturday so you lock your weekend. Then it gets moved back one week because of some reason. Then your parents say they are going to pay you a visit this weekend. As it just freed you tell them ok. Then the birthday party gets moved again to its previous place because actually the reason wasn't that good to move it.
This video is so validating for me to watch - this basically says I wasn't crazy when - as a child - I literally could not understand people because they were being so inconsistent in their emotional expression vs what was happening. And someone who is "smart" and therefore grasps concepts pretty fast, I was literally struggling to find adults who could explain the constant dissonance I was experiencing, because *they didn't know themselves*. I have seen this pattern more often: the more I engage with the topic of autism, the more similarities I see, while at the same time not having the same kind of struggles that autistic people have. I am a born empath - which for me means I by default imagine how I would feel if I was in their shoes. But no one learned me how to deal with that: not all feelings other people have are fun, and what do those feelings you feel in their stead mean? Over time I have learned where I end and the other person starts. Over time I learned that this empathic experience doesn't have any inherent meaning or value to it - it just "is" and how it makes me feel doesn't have any inherent meaning to it either. After that, it was a matter of observing people and learning their emotional language, and nowadays it has become a tool for me to use to stay emotional connected with the people I care for. Which also meant learning to trust others in a way that doesn't require me to continuously gauge their emotional state and be hyper vigilant. Thank for creating a video on emotional literacy, this is something that we - at least in the West - really fucking suck at.
omg seriously though, are we worse at understanding other people or are we more willing to say that we don't know? Also lots of emojis confuse me even though I love emojis 🤪💖
yeah what is this supposed to mean: 🙃 ... smiling but really not happy (reverse)? playfullness? ironic smile? idk or this: 🥸 being creepy? going undercover? what is it saying
@@heyy1829 It depends on context. You might see a picture of a crying teenage girl, and think she's sad. Pan out the view, and bam! She's at a Justin Bieber concert. With this context we understand crying indicates happiness
@@captainzork6109 yeah i see how context is crucial with these things... thats also a problem with texting, you only have this little letters and pictures on the screen, all other context about the person is hidden
Amazing video, I didn't realize there was a difference between emotion and affect. Also it's good to learn that allistic people aren't actually that good at identifying emotions. I knew they were bad at identifying autistic emotion but I thought it was just a "double empathy problem" thing. But apparently they also struggle understanding each other and themselves? That's good to know. One thing I noticed also is that I'm much more willing to ask for clarification even when I got it right, like, I think someone is upset at me but I'll ask anyway to be certain and yeah a lot of the time they're upset but at least I'm not making assumptions now. While allistic people often just assume and don't check and they might be right a lot of the time too (for things that are easy to identify) but when they're wrong they're just there assuming and it can really create issues. I often get eyerolls at me asking for clarification for "obvious" things but it always feel worth it when I end up catching something I didn't understand properly.
This video was fantastic to watch. Thank you for making it. After my partner found she was autistic 2 years ago with diminished ability to recognise social faux pas, I've been working harder to not take her affects and emotional processing personally and make incorrect projections on her feelings or intentions, based on more neurotypical contexts or my own bias
My smile is lopsided with one side going up more than the other. I would be rich if I had a dollar for every time I was told to wipe that smirk off my face. I was often accused of insincerity.
How are you so good at this! 💜 People REALLY want some sort of "truth detector". It is always frustrating when people start grasping at random things to determine intent as opposed to the actual actions people do.
Ember: "Honestly, don't even get me started on that trial, I am this close to making a video about it." Me: "Promises, promises... Don't threaten me with a good time." xD
personally i describe emotions via music. "feeling very hypochondriac by elita today" or "it's a werewolf by chloe mordiondo kinda day". i'm alexithymic so it's the only real way i can understand and relate to descriptions of emotions. i fake most of my expressions (i do smile or frown naturally but it doesn't always match my emotions) and vocal tone when i'm talking to people. like it all passes by some subconscious filter so that "bad" expressions don't get shown
Liget liget liget!!! I've had this emotion my whole life, the feeling of a motor spinning up, the percussion of movement, that feeling of intense energy and the need to move! It feels like I'm driven to the ends of the world to express these emotions, like a flash flood of self and truth and... gods it's nice to hhave this word finally.
Btw. It's actually not light blue and dark blue ...I think. Because I once tried to figure the difference out but got kinda nowhere. But I think it must have been more complicated than just light and dark. Although we do have a similar word to the other blue - sinij in russian and sininen in finnish. The word is likely a loan word in russian from the "aboriginal" languages of the area that finnish is related to. It's the oldest known word for a colour in our language, which is very strange as "blue" is usually a very late word to appear in languages. But therefore it might have originally meant just "dark" or black. But the difference might also be because of the icy and snowy environment, the winters are all shades of blue, white, black and brown.
Here are some "new emotion words" from my experiences. Emonaylsis: The unnerving emotion felt when consciously analyzing a situation so your response to their emotions can provide what is expected but not explicitly requested from the other person, with the knowledge you will be considered a bad friend if you don't get it right. DoneDamned: The feeling When you are condemned for doing the thing society has told you to do. Ex: a Society encourages and instills Stoicism, lambastes a neuroatypical person for not displaying emotions. Horrifracted: The deep horror of realizing that all the dehumanizing things that are popularly believed about you are likely someone with a degree projecting their own faults onto you and those like you and it proliferated without question through society to cause decades of unneeded suffering. The one tap on the glass that cracked society into the jagged shards that have cut at you your whole life.
FINALLY! I've been aware of this exact process/phenomenon for a long time, and have been trying to convince people I'm not just making it up. I can finally show people a primary source!
I just got to the part where you talk about how excitement and nervousness can feel similar. I (american) sometimes differentiate between the two by saying "good excited" and "bad excited." To me the idea of "excitement" is is the physical sensations: increased heartrate, weird rumbly stomach, high energy, and that can come from a lot of different places, whether it be happy enthusiasm, or fear, or worry and dread. I just thought it was an interesting thing. Sometimes I have a hard time with my therapist where she tries to get me to differentiate between when I'm feeling worry and anxiety, and then I have to ask her for the 50th time what the difference is between the 2. If I'm remembering her explanation correctly (which I'm probably not) worry is about stuff in the future, whereas anxiety is more about the right now, and tends to be more visceral. idk. I'm pretty bad at that.
I play social deception games a lot for fun and it is incredibly obvious that absolutely no-one is good at reading other people. Allistic people just like to pretend they are 😂
Gainy - That feeling you get when either small sounds or your tinnitus are driving you absolutely insane, almost as if you were listening to someone whose microphone has a lot of gain. "I was having a hard time sleeping last night because I was feeling very gainy, but then I turned on a fan and felt better."
I just found out i am autistic like... 3 days ago and was looking for resources and stuff. I really liked this video. I related a lot to the part where you suggested that we don't assume to quickly the emotions and intentions of other because we're used to being misunderstood. I always draw to people who others don't give a chance to, or give others the benefit of the doubt. And this has been a frequently negative experience for me as well as a positive one. So many people take advantage of me but at the same time, I also find people that the majority ostracize are also open minded and forgiving as to try to understand me. Weird kids/adults really do need to stick together and love each other the way only we understand.
I'm an overly expressive and loud autistic individual, pretty hyperactive aswell. I struggle with distinguishing which emotions are other people's and which are my own because of hyperempathy. I mean, I like having lots of empathy because it kinda makes relationships easier, but I'm still kind of rejected by peers at times, or even family, because I can't really control my emotions or tone them down to be calm or whatever that might mean... When I'm not feeling great mentally or when I'm tired, I can barely make any expression, so its a pretty big contrast. Despite having lots of empathy in the more "emotional" side , I REALLY really struggle with understanding points or view or opinions, anything that involves other people's thoughts or experiences. I just literally cannot understand how someone would think something that, in my mind, is overtly wrong and ridiculous. I love your channel and your videos!!! You illustrate your points clearly and with good arguments, and I love all of that!!!
I'm heavily emotional as an autistic person. No one seemed to understand, or just told me to block them up. I get so overwhelmed yet no one seemed to understand.
I never had real big problems with reading people, but I was really training it in my childhood to survive in the world and even now with 44 years, it still is taking up a lot of energy and I sometimes need some days to rest after meeting people. I call it my social hangover. Maybe it would have been less stressfull in my life, if I‘d known that I was autistic, when I was a child, but this revelation happened with 35 and helped me sooooo much since then.
First video I've watched of yours and ma'am you are extremely hilarious. Very grateful the algorithm managed to introduce me to your content, commenting to boost the algorithm and to wish you a good day :)
It's kinda hard to talk about interpretation of emotions without talking about emotional manipulation, especially since you mentionned the Depp v Heard trial (I will intentionally avoid saying which side I'm on because it's directly influenced by personal trauma). So many of us have been taken advantage of or target as the villain of a situation because of someone emotionally manipulating us and others. And it's exactly why so many people get obsessed with interpreting the "true" intent of someone, not just officers trying to put everyone in prison. How many of us thought "if only I could prove without a doubt that this person is bullshitting others into thinking I'm a psychopath or an hysteric monster". How many of us have been abused by people who were just better at making other sympathise for them? But of course the idea that we can prove someone's intent is wrong. I'm just saying that either way, we shouldn't forget that expressions can and will be used as a weapon and shield by the person wearing it too, and trauma also has a significant impact on how someone uses their face to avoid rejection or abuse or ego bruises in a way that the owner themselves won't really be conscious of. Facial expressions are just as messy as the human psyche.
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v rude of you to manipulate me into watching that ad because cat. 😤
These VPN ads really get on my nerves. I'm sure you've heard "gay pirate assassins" before, so I specifically wanted to point out tracking. The claims about tracking are false. There's a technique that advertisers use called fingerprinting, it uses the unique parts of your browser like it's type and version, your screen size, accessibility options, fonts you have, among many other things. This allows them to build a unique profile to cross reference even if you're not signed in, and yes, even if you're on a different network, like a public hotspot or a VPN.
It actually went to charge me 63 euro up front. Thank goodness I was alert before clicking it or I would have emptied my acc 😮
*Braininproc* (brain inner processing):
Emotion appears when analizing some facts. Feels like overthinking pain but with brain emptiness and inability to think. Feels like someone is using feeler's brain and you suffer because of their thinking ):
Beginner Empathy: I know exactly what that person feels
Advanced Empathy: No one knows what other people feel
Basically Duning Kruger effect
Confused Empathy: I feel what that person feels, and I still don't know what it is.
@@aspidoscelis
Beginner Empathy: I don't know what that person feels => depressed
Advanced Empathy: I don't know what that person feels => not depressed
As an empath-
I remember when I was a kid my mom and sister would constantly acuse me of lying because they thought my flat affect meant I was hiding something. When they made these acusations I would become nervous and embarassed under pressure and they took this as further proof of my duplicity. You can imagine how frustrating it was for me as a child to be distrusted this way.
Ughhh i know exactly what you mean. I had to get good at masking and scripting just to like...get through conversations with my mom too. And other people. It made you feel....wrong..like something was wrong with you bc youre just not doing it right.
ouu YES! my dad sometimes would call my expression "stupid", because when i get overwhelmed, face just... freeses? 😦 like that
hurts to this day :(
This happened a lot to me, too 😑
Also, adults would often just ignore me when I would report about pain or injuries (unless I had blood all over my clothes or something similarly gross going on).
I'm sad I relate to all of the replies and the original comment. We all deserved better.
@@rdarkstorm8414 same. 😢 and don’t forget the “don’t raise your voice with me.” When in your head you are speaking perfectly normally.
I'm annoyed at body language "experts" who read people avoiding eye contact as "lying". From my limited experience it is always those that stare you in the eye or even trying to get into your personal space are liars. It's like the cheapest manipulation to try and sell their "honesty". They also make big "puppy" eyes that look more like bulging "I accidentally peed myself" eyes
Context almost always matters, given that the same movement or expression can mean multiple things. People may divert their eyes when they're feeling ashamed, anxious, sad, scrutinized, thoughtful, or overstimulated, depending.
Thing is that there are no actual consistent tells in real life that someone is lying, this has been extensively studied, absolutely nobody can tell when a stranger is lying with any degree of accuracy unless it is an extremely obvious lie where you know its false even without seeing someone's expression. The idea that we can tell lying from body language or facial expression is confirmation bias.
This seems like one of those things where people seem to observe this behavior as the most common, or an average, and then that becomes the norm.
Even though there's an insane number of possibilities to it.
That only catches bad liars and people who are anxious when being interrogated whether they are telling the truth or not. Good liars are so used to lying they don’t show signs of anxiety.
@@robokill387A big factor is whether the lie is consequential. If someone is lying to avoid a very serious consequence, they might show more “tells”. The thing is, “tells” can be false positives for people who are nervous or afraid of being falsely accused, even when are telling the truth.
As for little white lies that are not of much consequence, these are not going to be easy to detect. Especially white lies that are so routine and automatic that they hardly require thought.
more of an ADHD thing but: Time Nausea - the dizzy feeling you get when you're trying to manage time blindness but your brain oscillates too rapidly between boredom and anxiety.
Oh dang, big ADHD thing 😂 I get this almost daily when I'm trying to coordinate schedules with people
i wanna know what does this mean
lolz…. hahahaha…… yeah
oh so that is what is making unable to human at times. i need to have a snack to get me to do the thing but then i forget what the thing originally was and then i lose track of time and i need to constantly be with proximity or my notebook and my planner and a clock oh and of course my fidgets. somehow i manage for the most part and then the cycle starts up again the next day.
That sounds relatable. Which is weird because I don't have ADHD.
While flat affect is common, some autistic people like me are highly expressive, but what we express is 'overly intense or unusual.' Nothing wrong with talking about flat affect, it's the most common- I just thought I'd throw in that there's a secret bonus way to fail at Socially Acceptable Expression.
as ovely expressive autistic person myself i feel you
Ooo, this stuff is why nobody considered autism except one guy who pinned the idea because of something I had said that was actually because I was being bullied!
I was about to say I do both, but I actually feel like my strong expressions match what I'm feeling a lot of the time. I have such intense emotions.
I oscillate between the two. I’m less likely to be overly expressive now, though, after some people attacked me in front of everyone in the room for making a face I didn’t know I made
It has always baffled me how confidently allistic people will assume what I'm feeling, though for most of my life its been more of "why does basically everyone feel so sure that they know my thoughts?"
Same and now looking back, few things make "Everyone has trouble reading emotions." so clear as when I was a kid and my peers bothered me while I was cowering, growling, and hissing until I reached meltdowns.
You know...i just realized that all my years on tumblr and in fandom, with other extremely ND people (especially autistic and adhd folks) meant we just...came up with specific emotions. Like being hellbrained (unable to stop thinking or talking about something even if it is very distressing) or skrunkly ( looking kinda fucked up but in a cute, charming way that elicites endearment).
I rly like a lot of those words tho so im taking them.
Anyway, i had the realization that allistics were also bad at reading emotions when I was working at a hotel, and everyone thought i didnt care about anything or thought i was better than everyone else, whoch led to me getting horribly bullied and shunned by my coworkers.
It took me asking one of them what the hell i did, why were they so mean? And they got real uncomfortable, and then explained that i seemed like a know it all and thought i knew better than everyone else. Specifically because i was always asking questions, especially about why we did something. Like whay the purpose of a rule was or a policy, bc to me it seemed ridiculous to do something and not even know why.
And i was lik..HUH??? i ask questions...so i can learn??? Ive never thought i knew more than you or anyone, i just like to learn about thinga and better understand them. :< And my coworker was so shocked.
Like she had assumed i really was just...idk, a smart ass. She did apologize for how she had been treating me, but...ever since then i still never understood why her not understanding why /I/ did something meant like..okay time to treat him like shit?? I told them all just ASK ME what im thinking or TELL ME that you dont understand. I do!! Its not hard!!! Augh!!!!!!
Abyway she stopped bullying me, but my bosses didnt. They used that and the fact i talked about like.."hey we do a lot of work here, we deserve better dont we?" As an excuse to abuse me into quitting, bc they couldnt just outright fire me for idk. Being autistic and talking about working conditions.
But what a time. Jesus christ.
It's a hierarchy thing, asking question means you're questionning the legitimacy of the hierarchy because you need the rule to make sense to apply it while you're expected to apply the rule regardless of it making sense because it comes from the top. Asking question and trying to understand threatens the legitimacy of hierarchical structure so people who need to understand what they're doing end up bullied to be put back in their place. And even people who're not at the top see it as a threat because they learned to not ask question and that it's a sign of their place in the hierarchy so if someone who is supposed to be at the same level as them asks question that means they must think they're above them.
It's of course very stupid, like, asking question means you don't know, you're litterally saying you know less than the other person and trying to fix that But hierarchies are very stupid in general
Some rules are even arbitrary and have no purpose other than check that you're following them and not questionning them, so trying to understand those is an immediate red flag and tend to get you ostracized at lightspeed.
@@Laezar1 yeah, this is all very much true. I realized this all afterwards, and tbh? I kept doing it on purpose. At different jobs, i politely and kindly asked questions. It became a way for me to guage if this was a place i wanted to work long term or not, bc if they were gonna get all shitty over just questions, i fuckin hit da bricks. It actualy helped me find way better jobs lmao. That hotel job radicalized me as much as it traumatized me, and i was not going totake any shit sitting down anymore.
But yeah i mean. Its probably why im an anarchist now. Hierarchies make no damn sense and are useless except for those on top, so fuck that.
@@revolutionofthekind based
My mother tells me a lot that I am "a know it all and think I know better than everyone else"... I never understand why. Maybe I should ask what she means. The problem being of course that describing how/why you feel something is so very hard, as this video has told us, and she has strong signs of adhd (imo and I should know I "work" around these kinds of ppl) and so is a ND person herself and probably won’t be able to tell me why she feels that way anyway. lol
I used to get bullied for this.
It is a bit if a relief to know even neurotypical people are bad at identifying their own emotions, too.
I frequently refer to a chart to find more specific words than "uncomfortable", "neutral", and "happy" to describe my emotions.
My family had one of those on the fridge for years and years when I was a kid
It was such a relief for me too! I knew it was important to identify emotions, and I knew other people were only able to heal from their trauma by feeling their feelings, but was struggling with it and getting very frustrated (so frustrated, in fact, that I was able to name that I was feeling frustrated).
I'd been approaching it like a scientist, trying to figure it out. After reading Dr. Feldman Barrett's book, I realized I need to approach it more like a creative writing exercise.
ABA is beyond terrible. I was shocked at how extensively it was still a thing. I remember having to leave a shift at work early (theatre ushering) when one of the universities was doing the graduation thing and about half of the 500 something students were graduating with degrees in ABA specifically. I was so baffled that these people could have studied this for an entire degree and not realised how utterly vile it was.
Talk about lack of empathy
Maybe the people who dedicated years of their lives studying for this degree specifically would have known more about it and how it has evolved from its creation than someone who just heard about it somewhere? Just a thought.
Many of them leave the profession when they realise that the autistic people who have been victims of it were right all along. It's being phased out in the EU for a reason: because Behaviourism is pseudoscience. But it's going strong in the USA cuz $$$ sorry.
@@binimbap universities still teach to medical professionals in training that people of color feel pain differently or to a lesser degree than white people. most psychiatrists think that cluster b personality disorders necessitate that you be kept sedated and away from any strong emotions lest you get overexcited and hurt someone. bigotry in medicine and academia in general is a massive problem. why would autistic people somehow be spared from experiencing medical and psychiatric abuse when literally every marginalized group is uniquely vulnerable to it??
@@Ember_Green I'm still so surprised that it's still big here in the US. Our own department of defense even did a study showing that it had minimal effectiveness, yet here we are
as someone who was completely clueless about being trans until my 20s despite the obvious dysphoria: yeah experiential blindness feels pretty real lol
I didn't even know what I was feeling was unusual till my mid 20s, then I discovered what agender was and identified as agender for the next decade, then I finally understood the extend of my masculitiny in mid 30s. Yep, experiential blindness is very real.
Same lol
The main benefit I got from having been a theater kid is learning to do expressions manually. I understand working retail gives you the same skill set. Occasionally freaks people out when I forget or don't bother and my affect goes flat though.
I feel this. Every now and then remembering, 'Oh yeah, I'm meant to move my face when interacting with other people.' I don't think the lockdowns helped that reaction tbh.
I have quite a few memories of being repeatedy asked if I was ok while I was just vibing at some party, often with earplugs in to dampen all the noise.
oh man so true. It masking really is like playing a role, especially for work...
same! very same!
Theater, saaaaame. Also memorizing scripted responses & making eye contact... I can still hear my old Broadway director yelling at me from the auditorium, "Look up! There's nothing interesting on the floor!!!!!"
I completely relate to the "flat face" issue. I'm so tired of being accused of being "angry" or having an "attitude" simply because I'm not showing an emotion. I swear I keep thinking I'm showing emotion when I'm not. It's even caused problems at work.
I mean, also, they shouldn't be getting mad at you for being angry anyway, as it's a perfectly normal and healthy emotion and not something bad in itself.
same it causes so many problems
You know I don't think I had a flat affect until being bullied in school made me develop one. Some of the kids were so into bullying me that they would take anything that I was interested in and try to find ways to bully me about them. So I learned to pretend to not care about things and have a poker face so that would keep ammunition out of their hands.
2:17 I work for Whole Foods Market (grocery store owned by Amazon) and within this past year they've changed their application process to include an assessment, quizzing people on how they would respond to different situations. One example being, "would you be willing to come into work despite adverse weather?" -- They're looking for people to just say yes, but as an autistic person, I'd obviously want to know "what kind? How severe?" Because the difference between 3 inches of snow and 30 is severe. But they don't want question-askers or trouble-makers, just blind compliance, which either intentionally or unintentionally results in weeding out neurodivergence. A coworker from my previous store was unable to transfer to mine because he failed this assessment, even though he had worked for the company for 5 years. We had an internal survey where we could leave notes anonymously, where some grievances would be passed up to corporate, and I completely tore into them for this ableist change. I know my words won't make a difference, but I hope at least _someone_ read it and became as uncomfortable as I am. My attention to detail and introversion are a boon for my monotonous, precise job; to weed us out before giving us a chance is terrible.
I despise these types of questions for the same reason! I am not being provided enough information to give a proper answer.
In a similar strain, I’ve found that English classes tend to have an undercurrent of “neurotypical assumption.” For example, trying to find irony. It’s difficult for me to do so when it’s not blatantly obvious, yet throughout my years of education I’ve constantly had points taken off for not being able to see it. It’s infuriating. Yet because I always did very well, no one seemed to notice I was struggling and compensating by spending nearly every hour of every afternoon on homework and practice.
Honestly I lied I researched what they wanted to hear bc I was that desperate for a job and I could never hold one due to my dyslexia and overall bad executive function to do specific tasks
I hate when people say stuff like "don't give me that face" or "you look sad/upset/whatever" and I'm like I do know what my face us doing
The main emotion I felt during my grandpa's funeral was anxiety that I would put on the wrong facial expression. I learned as a child that the best way to put people at ease (and therefore avoid their feelings escalating) was to smile, so I spent the whole time monitoring my face to make sure it didn't smile, instead of, you know, grieving.
You don't even need studies to prove that reading facial expressions or other nonverbal queues is BS. It's obvious in the miscommunication that frequently occurs among those who think you can. People often infer what is not implied because of projection. They think "if I said this I would mean this" or "if I had that facial expression in response to that it would mean this"; thus, that must be the case with this other person. Relationships are destroyed by people carrying around grudges over perceived slights that were not intended to be slights at all. All totally avoidable if we communicate clearly and ask for clarification when we are unsure what was meant.
Rubby. This comes from my cousin (I don't think she was autistic) who loved to feel things she deemed nice under her fingers. She found it calming. So rubby refers to any material she liked to rub. I showed up one day wearing a velvet shirt, and upon hugging me she commented happily on my "rubby shirt". I love some of these terms here!
Also, thanks for pointing out more horrible history to me. I'm now even more disgusted by conversion therapy, knowing it comes directly from torturing autistic children. (I really do enjoy learning historical things.)
Body language “experts” will look at a dog baring its teeth out of anger/fear and go “aaaww he’s happy, he’s smiling”
Artphoria: when you get so focused on making a piece of art that you stop caring about the rest of the world, and for just a moment, a glimmer of joy and pride shines through the clouds of your generalized anxiety and low self esteem 😊
That's so specific yet so relatable
When we were 13, my friend asked me for advice on how to be more expressive after another friend mistook her flat affect for a lack of care. I explained to her my process of making expressions in the mirror, naming those expressions and thinking of times I'd seen that word used in books so I had examples of situations in which it would be appropriate to make them, making expressions near a mirror and then looking in the mirror to make sure they still looked right, and then memorizing how the tension in my face felt so during the day I could monitor myself to make sure I was making an appropriate expression. She said that was too much work for her, which supported my hypothesis that she was "bad at knowing what her face was doing" because she simply hadn't put in the same work everyone else had. I blamed this on her hippy parents who never taught her the importance of maintaining appearances or hard work and was privately glad that my parents had started "correcting" my behaviors when I was just a toddler. 14 years later, we've both had our struggles but one of us has a close, supportive relationship with her parents and one of us had a crash and burn breakdown from the fatigue of masking for decades. Bet you can guess which one is which.
There's a sad irony to things like 42:35 where *we're* the ones said to have problems feeling/expressing emotions and yet the people who are supposedly "experts" in emotion don't seem to display any regret at the consequences of their actions.
This reminds me of a quote from one of my favorite games, The World Ends With You.
"Everyone has their own little internal world -- a secret garden only they can enter. Each world follows its own internal logic -- individuality. And the logic of one world means nothing in another. ...Understanding other people isn't hard, Neku. It's impossible."
This quote has always stuck with me, for before my autism diagnosis. I'm beginning to wonder if this video is giving me a clue as to why
When I was a kid, I hated receiving gifts coz people would literally get angry at me for not showing the emotions they wanted to see. I felt all the things but they didn’t understand my emotional expressions in context. Seeing baby you in the video, I absolutely saw how excited you were coz it’s pretty much how I expressed emotions as a kid. It breaks my heart that NTs can’t see it coz it’s obvious. You were absolutely in awe! That’s why I learned to mask using over exaggerated emotional expression as a comedic buffer to deal with the double empathy problem. Like if I perform how I’m feeling in a grandiose pantomime, maybe the allistic brain can interpret it properly, coz they’re not going to ask and if I volunteer my feelings, they’ll think I’m lying coz it doesn’t match their internal projections based on their own assumptions. It’s like playing charades with aliens who are unfamiliar with my earth ways, except that they’re the standard that I’m supposed to hold myself to and try to mimic.
Yes! My mother would remind me before visiting relatives - “make sure you act surprised!” and we’d practice making happy surprised looks at each other. When I would forget, she’d get so upset… my step-grandma didn’t want me to come back and visit anymore because she thought I was ungrateful for a gift that I absolutely loved
as an autistic person i get it real often that people think they can get a read on me or how i feel and think that because i did one thing or looked a certain way i must feel a certain way. when i actually dont feel the way they think at all. but because they think body language and expressions are so universal and innate, they dismiss any of my corrections and just think im lying. its SO annoying.
New concepts:
Frume: a trance-like euphoria that is both energizing and exhausting when you are in a creative flow
Foconscious: a deep immersion in your environment that makes you lose your self-perception
I’ve had both of these and never knew how to describe it
I love this. I was too foconscious cleaning and organizing to sooth myself mentally that I forgot all other aspect related to self care, such as eating, taking a bath, etc.
Wow so many creators I like started UA-cam pretty much exactly 3 years ago. It is such a mind boggling coincidence that they all started in the spring of 2020. Such a coincidence.
i’m autistic and lack empathy, also naturally have really flat affect. i learnt how to fake emotions and tailor my personality to appease neurotypicals, but when i tell them this almost every time they’re like “that’s so manipulative”
like buddy, pal, my guy, neurotypicals do the same thing but automatically 😭 i just had to learn so y’all wouldn’t bully me
On the topic of flat aspects, I remember in elementary school, a lunch lady asked what I was upset about when I was actually in a very good mood. I was confused, to say the least. Even if I wasn't smiling, I certainly was not upset. It was that moment I decided to practice facial expressions.
I do wonder if it did me any good.
My constant life. "Why are you so mad?" "...I'm having a great day."
What's funny is, I always assumed I was a very expressive person... but when I started questioning whether I might be on the spectrum, I realized that I often become conscious of the need to form a smile at appropriate times. I think I smile autonomously, too, but there are definitely many times that a fleeting thought precedes the action when I'm around other people: "make your face smile, not too big, is this natural?" in, like, a microsecond of consciousness.
Of course, when I worked in a public-facing job many years ago, I also used to get the obnoxious exhortations to "Smile!", mostly from old men. Ugh. I don't think the two are related, but honestly my memory of the facial expression thing just doesn't go back that far so maybe they are.
Yep, people in school often asked me why I was mad or sad when I was feeling perfectly fine.
@@VeganAtheistWeirdo I am nearly constantly smiling, though I don't know if that is autism or just me trying to stave off depression. I went to a doctor once and my mom said that despite how bad I was doing I just kept smiling through it, I don't really do that anymore though.
@@Beenevolence Wow. I hope you're doing better now, this sounds familiar.
My classmates used to ask me if I had emotions because of my flat affect. It hurt. I can't imagine what it must be like to hear your own mother say something like that. That's really f*cked up. It's like hearing your mother say that she doesn't really think you're a person.
REALLY looking forward to this video. A few hours ago, I (an Autistic undergrad with a special interest on neurodivergence) was invited to give a lecture about that very same topic at a center that helps Autistic ppl with high support needs. The atypical emotional responses of those people often lead their parents to think that they don't really feel emotions. The familes are often of very low income, sometimes so much so that they can't afford a table. Thus, their relative lack of knowledge on the nuances of autism is understandable, but still enourmously sad. I'll try looking for texts by nonverbal Autists about how they feel and communicate. Any suggestions?
Ok so I'm in the middle of some stuff rn but I don't want to forget to reply: I included some links to articles, blogs & videos by non-speaking autistic people in my last video. I don't know if they talk specifically about emotions, but they definitely go into their experiences. They're included in the sources document linked below this video:
ua-cam.com/video/qlV27yFLRqU/v-deo.html
the reason i jump is a book written entirely by a nonverbal autistic man, its very good!
Elizabeth Bonker is extremely articulate and is also a non-speaker. I believe she works at 4 ALL and is their comms director. Worth Googling if she had published content similar to what you're looking for
My psychiatrist told me I am unable to read microexpressions and that's why I make other people "deeply uncomfortable" and give off "serial killer vibes" and id internalized that (I don't really make expressions at all and the few I do are subconscious and "look forced or faked") and accepted it as the reason for why I make strangers uncomfortable and after listening to this I have no clue what to think anymore or what that means about why strangers start off thinking I'm creepy or "off"
I can't believe a psychiatrist said that to you!? "Serial killer vibes"!? No. Omg. Yea, it's the double empathy problem. NT people read us wrong all the time. If you consider that emotions don't live in facial expressions, you could try other ways to make your emotions understood without forcing your face into expressions that aren't natural to you?
27:45 "...without these emotional concepts you woudln't even be able to recognise these concepts in yourself."
Yeah.. about that... I'ma talk a bit and then take a break from watching. That hit me deep and hard and not in a fun way.
I grew up in a family that ignored emotions for all kinds of reasons. One result of that was that I was never taught any concept of any emotion and my emotions weren't discussed. Yes, that is extreme emotional neglect and that's not the subject now.
I honestly didn't know what emotions were or how to feel about anything. When our dog died, when my grandmother died, I was annoyed and frustrated with people's sadness. It's part of life as far as I was concerned. Losing and missing someone, or a loved pet, was just a part of that. You accept it and move on. I thought I might be a sociopath.
Until one day, I was curious, what if I caused something I regret, by breaking something I hold dear. I would know that regret is what I should be feeling. So I broke an oversized bottle that I had one of and I could not get back or replace. I also broke my heart in the process, for science! Nah, just for me, to learn.
I felt sad and powerless to reverse or fix it, and I also realized I had been sad before and I could've responded differently in situations. I realized I had lost loved ones and pets and never gave anyone the acknowledgement of their emotions.
I realized that I had never acknowledged my emotions and that no one else had either. I felt alone and abandoned and I was.
A lot has changed for me. I'm not alone, even when I'm by myself. I have learned to recognise and express and deal with my and other people's emotions. But that past will for the rest of my life be a part of me, along with the sadness I feel for myself and the people who were around me during my growing up. Everyone in my life and myself included have been missing out on a lot. I am not a sociopath. My emotions are valid and valuable, as am I. The love I give to people around me and the love I receive in return now could've been a part of our lives the whole time, instead of the misery and anxiety I had been feeling for all of my life. That will never change and it will always F'ing SUCK!
And yeah, as you've pointed out in another video, and as therapists and scientists have shown, cognitive therapy has helped deal with it and made it easier to think back and not crumble into a useless immobile mess. I have accepted that that too is a part of who I am. But it also will always hurt.
And now I'ma do some small chores for myself because I am worth the kindness of those actions and I kinda like myself
idk what to call it but: the stress you feel when you don’t want someone to know something but you can’t just say something false because it hurts to say false things
This relates mostly to my OCD, but I use the phrase "body day" for when I'm so under-stimulated I feel it in individual body parts. I'll be hyper aware of my body and have a lot of compulsions and intrusive thoughts focused on sensation or self harm. Once my friends knew what it meant, it made it easier to ask for help grounding when I need it
People were often angry at me when I apologised for something because I “didn’t look sorry at all”. And once my dad thought I was being aggressive for no reason when I was actually excited and happy. Ironic that in time my emotions have gotten much more detached but I’ve trained my expressions to “pass better” for the “appropriate situation”.
“Focus haze” when you’re looking into someones eyes to try to signal to them you’re fully engaged & listening. but then your eyes slip into your mind, and you (probably) look glazed over at this point, while staring into their eyes and they’re still talking at you, but you’re somewhere completely different. And then you have to respond to whatever it was they said! Anyone?
I don’t know how you do it. I usually get super bored with long videos where people speak at a “regular to slow” speed. But with you I’m just fully focus and engaged during the whole video. Not sure what it is but it manages to keep my adhd brain completely mesmerized 🤩
Learning more about perceptions of emotion is not only interesting but… clearing up a lot of previous experiences I had as a kid. People struggled to understand my expressions and I was often accused of lying or being rude, and I’ve recently discovered that I’m autistic. People were just working under a more complex system of social rules than I was - I would be honest, then be accused of lying because I didn’t make eye contact or struggled to put my feelings into words. I was accused of being overly dramatic because I was overwhelmed by their voices and needed them to speak to me differently. When I became friends with new people, I was very often told that before they got to know me, they thought I was really intimidating.
Thank you for making this. I think it’s really validating for other autistic people, and more neurotypical people should have access to this information, so that we can all communicate more effectively. If only folks could just be upfront without so many bells and whistles about it.
I think many of us (I'm ADHD not Autistic, but I think this applies to everyone) have had the shitty experience of having someone else impose their idea of what they think we're feeling onto us. It's usually wildly over simplistic.
Most typical one for me is "crying means your sad". Whereas I will regularly cry from frustration, anger, happiness, or just overwhelm. I got the giggles at my granny's funeral, as did my sisters (a group emotional outburst there). If you catch me making any face while alone in a room, there's a good chance I'm acting out a dialogue in my head and it is expressing on my face.
One thing that tends to be common in folks on the Spectrum is that they often struggle with emotional regulation. So if an autistic person is stressed due to a factor that might just be mildly irritating to their allistic friend or relative, what can come off as an unreasonable or self-centered response may just be the result of said person being so monumentally uncomfortable that they struggle to keep other people's feelings in check. It's hard to remain calm in a burning building if you are already on fire.
meltdown-onset anxiety: the anxiety felt between overwhelm and meltdown, when you know the crash is coming but can't extricate yourself from the situation and it just cascades...
Anyway i finally got away to finish watching this! Love it 😊
12:16 the funniest thing about that brilliant drop of reasoning is how everyone involved was clearly obsessed with and fascinated by that type of parisian related trivia. Which is very common, as a half n' half myself I've been met with a bunch of questions or outright assignments of stereotypes I was neither familiar with nor particularly fit the description of. But I often took them on without even realising.
People doubt nurture plays as significant a role as it does, often picturing explicit teachings and black and white experiences, but it's far more subtle and potent, you can be peer pressured to alter your behaviour by a description of relatives you've never met, you can be nudged to imitate someone simply by repeated exposure, it's all a big convoluted accident.
excellent video!!! and ah yeah. i remember being a very very anxious teen, regularly had panic attacks, felt like i never learned how to socialize, so i spent all the time when company was over hiding away. my dad told me he thought i was elitist and viewed myself as better than others so i didn't talk to them. very cool thing to say to a teenager struggling with severe social anxiety and self hatred lmao.
people all the time read my flat affect and me hardly speaking as me being bored or mad at them or something similar. one of my biggest pet peeves is when people put words in my mouth based on what they think my expression is. they're never right. wish there was more of a culture of asking how people are feeling, and people responding with meaningful answers hahah
Thank you. A few weeks ago, I found out (had it confired by official diagnosis) that I am autistic. I'm 54, and I never knew. So many times, I have gotten frustrated because friends, coworkers, and family members would always react to other people when they were upset but never to me. I never received empathy or concern from people unless I verbally expressed my distress. I often got treated like my health concerns were no big deal or that I was lying or putting on about how bad I felt, which is so doubly frustrating because I don't like to complain about physical discomfort and have an extremely high pain tolerance. A few years ago, I did have a conversation with a long-term friend wherein she confirmed that I have a pretty non-expressive face.
Your video helps me understand a lot.
One of the other problems, as I see it, is the lack of empathy and concern from others contributes to the stress and distress of whatever is going on and this mounting and unrelieved stress has definitely led to meltdowns in the past.
It's sad to think that my only real recourse in avoiding this in the future is to never expect others to be able to tell how I feel and show compassion without my having to ask for it, but knowing that may at least lower the stress buildup so that I can calm myself down.
Complegue (come-plea-g) - the sensation of fatigue felt upon finishing a task, especially an undesirable or otherwise delayed task.
Complements:
Crungetic (kruhn-jet-ick)- the feeling of anxious, nervous, or excited energy experienced while performing a task under time pressure.
PLEASE, I'd LOVE to see you make a video on the bullshit that went on with the Depp-Heard case. I've been aware of it since it first came out years ago, initially as a huge fan of Depp's work. People were so foaming at the mouth to insist Heard HAD to have done something wrong --to deserve it-- because Depp was initially claiming it was a mutually abusive relationship despite ZERO evidence for it at the time, and from the jump my take was "IF she also abused him then that's ALSO bad and they BOTH should be expected to work on those issues, HOWEVER Depp has to provide some evidence of that and right now there is literally nothing indicating she did anything to him, and a MOUNTAIN of evidence he clearly abused her, including him being abusive on camera, and accounts from coworkers about him treating others that way too." And they were all like "YOU'LL SEE, I BET YOU DON'T ACTUALLY THINK THAT WHEN HE DOES PROVE IT."
And then he provided like ONE piece of evidence of her being violent and abusive in their relationship. And I was like "Alright yeah, that's fucked up, it seems like this was a theme in their relationship that went back and forth, they should both take some time to get better and make sure they don't do this again." And all of the Depp supporters, 90% of the people who were fence sitting, and half of the people who rightly initially supported Heard were like *SHE'S EVIL IT'S ALL HER FAULT EVERYTHING SHE SAID WAS LIES DEPP DID NOTHING WRONG SHE'S THE DEVIL!!!* When literally nothing changed about the pile of evidence of Depp being abusive. Just a woman reciprocated her partner's abuse and all of a sudden nothing that happened to her or that her partner did matters anymore.
enholed: the feeling of helplessness/despair/frustration/awkwardness while on hold when trying to call Adult Autism Services and find out if you're going to get that third appointment you've been waiting for. eg: "Blackcountry Heathcare NHS trust left me enholed for over three years"
Stumbled upon this video today, and I'm so happy I did. It made me realized how even I (27, AuDHD diagnosed at 10, fixated on learning about it since then. ) have spread so many misinformation about autistic people and emotions.
Also, I was really surprised when you showed the video. Maybe it's just my personal experience, but to me it was immediately obvious that you were excited about the gift. You didn't take your eyes off it for one second. And the stimming and the little taps on the box. Absolutely adorable!
I liked the show Lie to Me in that one of the things the main guy constantly said was that sure you can read specific emotions but that tells you nothing about WHY that emotion is being expressed. The assumptions people make about people's emotions based on facial expressions are terrible.
Love the comments on introverted Americans struggling to have jobs, you are not wrong.
Screaming at your jumper because it's greige might be one of my favorite Ponderful jokes. Too goddamn good.
"Anger anger anger anger anger anger anger" just sounds like Matt Walsh's morning meditation mantra.
I have seen a lot of coverage on UA-cam of late covering narcissism. However, it seems to me that a lot of what is considered to be identifiers for narcissistic behaviour can also be taken as identifiers for autistic behaviour, especially when divorced of context or intent. I find that many workplaces have policies which are unduly harsh for autistic adults, especially those who have not been formally diagnosed in childhood, and the discrimination between those with and without formal diagnosis in the workplace can be quite shocking. In the end, ignoring intent in policies and diagnosis just makes society increasingly more toxic for autistic individuals. It's no surprise that many autistic people don't have any interest in socialising in societies that often misunderstand and mistreat them - to the point that it's quite easy for some autistic people to develop narcissism, and essentially become the "monsters" they are often already treated as. I would be very interested in seeing a video that tackles the issue of narcissism and autism - almost every comparison video I have seen essentially others autistic people, and whilst there may be some hand-wringing and remorse regarding the hurt such assertions of narcissism can have against such individuals, they immediately dive straight back in with their assertions of behaviours that always indicate narcissism, completely ignoring intent and context...
Thank you for describing affect in more detail! I used to think I was really good at reading emotions because I'm very sensitive to affect and energy level changes. When I started finding out more about autism, I realized I just always assumed I was the cause of negative changes to affect, and then whenever I was right it stuck, reinforcing that notion.
Realizing that I only understood good/bad/neutral was really eye opening and helpful, and you gave words to that understanding!
My child, who is autistic loves roller coasters. They love watching videos about roller coasters, they'll happily queue for hours to get on a roller coaster, they'll excitedly talk about going to a roller coaster for hours. They'll stim with barely contained excitement when they are about to get on a roller coaster.
When they are on it, being thrown around, turned upside down, pulling g-forces you'd only normally experience in a car crash with all around them screaming in wild enjoyment and terror, my child's face is impassive. Like sitting on a park bench.
At the end they'll leap off, completely buzzing and excitedly talk about the next ride they'll go on.
Just because I can't see the pleasure (or fear, disgust, joy etc) does not mean its not there.
One day they might get better at telling me how they are feeling. Until then it's my job to figure it out.
Omg yeah I ended up in a terrible feedback loop of feeling physically anxious and then thinking about all the reasons I might feel that way and then those things would give me anxiety, turns out eating gluten just imitates that feeling of my stomach sinking that I get when I think things are really bad. People would be like "it's all in your head," no it's in my tummy!
Everything you said about how autistics need to be seeking out learning to do it...... oh dang. That SO explains the Book of Rules thing and why I'm always like "wow I wish these socialization things were spelled out to me earlier"
...OBSESSED with sparkle-brained. tempted to make it my entire personality now omg
Growing up, I was always told I lack empathy, and that that made me an inherently morally bad person. The same people who told me I was incapable of empathy mocked and belittled me for expressing empathy for fictional characters.
Apropos of nothing, did you know that, in the absence of an ability to empathize, sociopaths instead project their own motives and affectations onto others?
It certainly doesn't help matters that they respond with hostility whenever we emote the ways they say we're supposed to.
Lovaas talked about autists literally the exact same way 18th-century colonialists talked about Pacific islanders.
I think I remember you did a similar video, the idea that all body language is universal and it's really pseudoscience.
I got confused and thought this video started yesterday, I went looking at 22:00 and noticed I got the date wrong.
It was supposed to premiere yesterday but there was a mix-up with the sponsor so I had to postpone. And yes - good catch! It's a remake of my first ever video, to celebrate my 3 year UA-cam anniversary 😊
Münecats? Sorry i think it was münecats and how people just culturally do that instead it actually being "universal" and people just adopting to that in learned reaponses, well mostly.
Its more about body language reading experts and bs but similar?! .
Anyways that video should be good.
I have complicated feelings about autism and empathy. I have been diagnosed with autism, and (as best I can tell) I do have low empathy. I do my best to act as if I have more empathy because I believe a certain amount of empathy is morally necessary. But it is ultimately an act. I think I am a cold person who's just doing their impression of a good person.
If anything i'd say that is more admirable than someone who does it naturally, as you see the value in such an interaction and seek to use that for the benefit of others.
Ethically speaking thought crimes are meaningless
Even if you believe it an act the moral choice to engage in that act should still be considered a positive. You would rather act in a way you don't necessarily feel to the benefit of other as opposed to their detriment when you have the choice.
You dont need to develop psychic powers contrary to the impression some of us might be getting. If we respect people that is not a small thing.
Cold is not equal to bad
What do you think would be different or feel different if you did have more empathy?
Very important information! I had a good discussion with my mother-in-law recently about micro-expressions and the like, and the bunk research behind it. More people need to understand the non-universality of facial expressions and emotion concepts in general.
I'm going to need to make a list of the autistic emotion words for future use.
I spent so much time in fourth grade, staring at the “feelings” poster, memorizing the face-line cartoons as if they were maps. I kept a notebook of face doodles too, but I always thought it was my own failure, that I couldn’t crack the code
Thank you for the wonderful video and congrats on 3 years! I'm almost 50 and only recently been diagnosed with autism. Ever since I was a child I've been in psychiatric care because something was 'wrong' with me that needed to be 'fixed'. The part with those children really hit me hard. I never had anything that horrible happen to me, but I do know what it feels like to be taunted to the point where you just break. And then to hear them say that autistic people have no empathy is so insulting.
It's frankly incredible how hearing the word "scranch" produced that very same feeling in me almost immediately. Most often, my physical sensory stuff end up bothering my top front teeth even when the vast majority of it isn't teeth related, like my feet upon many types of carpet, and Scranch is so perfect for that feeling.
Oh, and the video on the whole was really good! Felt incredibly validating and was able to put a lot of my feelings into well-researched words
7:15 it's turn that frown upside down, because a true smile is with your eyes >.>
Best remake and it wasn't even done by a Hollywood studio
I can't think up a good word off the top of my head, but I enjoyed the video!
The thing that always gets me about Ekman's test and others like it is that they're not showing subjects pictures of people feeling different emotions, they're showing them pictures of actors/models who have been told to make certain facial expressions.
I think this is part of why I feel so much more comfortable interacting with people online. I don't have to outwardly show my amusement or excitement or sadness or what have you, instead I can just tell people that's how I'm feeling and I'm believed; and everyone is missing a bunch of the context too, unless it's stated outright. I'm also much better at putting together context and nuance from the written word than I am from spoken things and the fact that written things give a bit more time for processing if needed since there's that delay built it in inherently (as opposed to spoken conversation that has a much more rapid flow) really helps. Interestingly enough, I was told often as a child that I was being too dramatic; usually because I'd be very quiet and sort of repress my discomfort until I no longer could and then melt down emotionally at what seemed like a very small thing (except inside, it had been this wave of emotion and reaction that was building for ages).
In online communication sometimes I can like recognize the emotion/response someone is trying to get out of me but sometimes in real space I just wouldn't be able to properly give it to them. I like that online communication lets me be more polite/engaged than I might be able to otherwise.
76 and seeking diagnosis. This video brought tears to my eyes. I’m very emotional, even empathetic. Yet so many things you said affect me deeply.During childhood my mother broke my heart by accusing me of acting when we argued. In reality it was taking everything I had to face overwhelming grief and anger. Confusion has always thrown me into a state of panic, and my mother’s rejection of me at that very moment felt like betrayal.
As someone who’s autistic and also has other disabilities, I don’t do well with tone sometimes.
I personally enjoy texting or other electronic communication because you don’t have to try and gauge or assume intent. Whereas if my partner on a voice/video call says something in just a different way than usual or with an expression I didn’t expect, I have to quickly do the “is she mad? Did I miss her saying something before? What did I do wrong?” Mental gymnastics before either asking her about it (either directly or she asks me if I have a perplexed expression), or just reminding myself “hey, no, she loves me, she’s not upset, it’s ok”.
It’s not her fault of course, just me worried that I’m not good enough, even though she keeps reminding me she thinks I am, or that my autism will be too much for her as it has been in the past for others, which she also reminds me won’t happen either.
Anyway, sorry for the long ramble. I just saw your channel and am diving into the backlogs while on a break from schoolwork.
Not sure if it is a common thing for autistic people or just a me thing:
otherwhelmed: When you anxiously see stuff accumulating on your time schedule because other people make them happen despite what have been previously decided and you know there is going to be an issue.
example: friend A has a birthday party planned since months. It is scheduled for Saturday so you lock your weekend. Then it gets moved back one week because of some reason. Then your parents say they are going to pay you a visit this weekend. As it just freed you tell them ok. Then the birthday party gets moved again to its previous place because actually the reason wasn't that good to move it.
This video is so validating for me to watch - this basically says I wasn't crazy when - as a child - I literally could not understand people because they were being so inconsistent in their emotional expression vs what was happening. And someone who is "smart" and therefore grasps concepts pretty fast, I was literally struggling to find adults who could explain the constant dissonance I was experiencing, because *they didn't know themselves*.
I have seen this pattern more often: the more I engage with the topic of autism, the more similarities I see, while at the same time not having the same kind of struggles that autistic people have. I am a born empath - which for me means I by default imagine how I would feel if I was in their shoes. But no one learned me how to deal with that: not all feelings other people have are fun, and what do those feelings you feel in their stead mean?
Over time I have learned where I end and the other person starts. Over time I learned that this empathic experience doesn't have any inherent meaning or value to it - it just "is" and how it makes me feel doesn't have any inherent meaning to it either.
After that, it was a matter of observing people and learning their emotional language, and nowadays it has become a tool for me to use to stay emotional connected with the people I care for. Which also meant learning to trust others in a way that doesn't require me to continuously gauge their emotional state and be hyper vigilant.
Thank for creating a video on emotional literacy, this is something that we - at least in the West - really fucking suck at.
omg seriously though, are we worse at understanding other people or are we more willing to say that we don't know? Also lots of emojis confuse me even though I love emojis 🤪💖
Nailed it 😊
🥰
yeah what is this supposed to mean: 🙃
... smiling but really not happy (reverse)? playfullness? ironic smile? idk
or this: 🥸
being creepy? going undercover? what is it saying
@@heyy1829 It depends on context. You might see a picture of a crying teenage girl, and think she's sad. Pan out the view, and bam! She's at a Justin Bieber concert. With this context we understand crying indicates happiness
@@captainzork6109 yeah i see how context is crucial with these things... thats also a problem with texting, you only have this little letters and pictures on the screen, all other context about the person is hidden
Amazing video, I didn't realize there was a difference between emotion and affect. Also it's good to learn that allistic people aren't actually that good at identifying emotions. I knew they were bad at identifying autistic emotion but I thought it was just a "double empathy problem" thing. But apparently they also struggle understanding each other and themselves? That's good to know.
One thing I noticed also is that I'm much more willing to ask for clarification even when I got it right, like, I think someone is upset at me but I'll ask anyway to be certain and yeah a lot of the time they're upset but at least I'm not making assumptions now. While allistic people often just assume and don't check and they might be right a lot of the time too (for things that are easy to identify) but when they're wrong they're just there assuming and it can really create issues. I often get eyerolls at me asking for clarification for "obvious" things but it always feel worth it when I end up catching something I didn't understand properly.
This was so interesting, especially the part about context. Congrats on 3 years 🎉
Thank you!
This video was fantastic to watch. Thank you for making it. After my partner found she was autistic 2 years ago with diminished ability to recognise social faux pas, I've been working harder to not take her affects and emotional processing personally and make incorrect projections on her feelings or intentions, based on more neurotypical contexts or my own bias
My smile is lopsided with one side going up more than the other. I would be rich if I had a dollar for every time I was told to wipe that smirk off my face. I was often accused of insincerity.
How are you so good at this! 💜
People REALLY want some sort of "truth detector". It is always frustrating when people start grasping at random things to determine intent as opposed to the actual actions people do.
Algorithm boost
Ooh, good idea. Get that engagement, girl!
Functioned-out: the feeling of not being able to things that require using a lot of executive functions any more.
Ember: "Honestly, don't even get me started on that trial, I am this close to making a video about it."
Me: "Promises, promises... Don't threaten me with a good time." xD
personally i describe emotions via music. "feeling very hypochondriac by elita today" or "it's a werewolf by chloe mordiondo kinda day". i'm alexithymic so it's the only real way i can understand and relate to descriptions of emotions.
i fake most of my expressions (i do smile or frown naturally but it doesn't always match my emotions) and vocal tone when i'm talking to people. like it all passes by some subconscious filter so that "bad" expressions don't get shown
Liget liget liget!!! I've had this emotion my whole life, the feeling of a motor spinning up, the percussion of movement, that feeling of intense energy and the need to move!
It feels like I'm driven to the ends of the world to express these emotions, like a flash flood of self and truth and... gods it's nice to hhave this word finally.
Btw. It's actually not light blue and dark blue ...I think. Because I once tried to figure the difference out but got kinda nowhere. But I think it must have been more complicated than just light and dark.
Although we do have a similar word to the other blue - sinij in russian and sininen in finnish. The word is likely a loan word in russian from the "aboriginal" languages of the area that finnish is related to. It's the oldest known word for a colour in our language, which is very strange as "blue" is usually a very late word to appear in languages. But therefore it might have originally meant just "dark" or black. But the difference might also be because of the icy and snowy environment, the winters are all shades of blue, white, black and brown.
Here are some "new emotion words" from my experiences.
Emonaylsis: The unnerving emotion felt when consciously analyzing a situation so your response to their emotions can provide what is expected but not explicitly requested from the other person, with the knowledge you will be considered a bad friend if you don't get it right.
DoneDamned: The feeling When you are condemned for doing the thing society has told you to do. Ex: a Society encourages and instills Stoicism, lambastes a neuroatypical person for not displaying emotions.
Horrifracted: The deep horror of realizing that all the dehumanizing things that are popularly believed about you are likely someone with a degree projecting their own faults onto you and those like you and it proliferated without question through society to cause decades of unneeded suffering. The one tap on the glass that cracked society into the jagged shards that have cut at you your whole life.
FINALLY! I've been aware of this exact process/phenomenon for a long time, and have been trying to convince people I'm not just making it up. I can finally show people a primary source!
I just got to the part where you talk about how excitement and nervousness can feel similar. I (american) sometimes differentiate between the two by saying "good excited" and "bad excited." To me the idea of "excitement" is is the physical sensations: increased heartrate, weird rumbly stomach, high energy, and that can come from a lot of different places, whether it be happy enthusiasm, or fear, or worry and dread. I just thought it was an interesting thing. Sometimes I have a hard time with my therapist where she tries to get me to differentiate between when I'm feeling worry and anxiety, and then I have to ask her for the 50th time what the difference is between the 2. If I'm remembering her explanation correctly (which I'm probably not) worry is about stuff in the future, whereas anxiety is more about the right now, and tends to be more visceral. idk. I'm pretty bad at that.
I play social deception games a lot for fun and it is incredibly obvious that absolutely no-one is good at reading other people. Allistic people just like to pretend they are 😂
Gainy - That feeling you get when either small sounds or your tinnitus are driving you absolutely insane, almost as if you were listening to someone whose microphone has a lot of gain.
"I was having a hard time sleeping last night because I was feeling very gainy, but then I turned on a fan and felt better."
I just found out i am autistic like... 3 days ago and was looking for resources and stuff. I really liked this video. I related a lot to the part where you suggested that we don't assume to quickly the emotions and intentions of other because we're used to being misunderstood. I always draw to people who others don't give a chance to, or give others the benefit of the doubt. And this has been a frequently negative experience for me as well as a positive one.
So many people take advantage of me but at the same time, I also find people that the majority ostracize are also open minded and forgiving as to try to understand me. Weird kids/adults really do need to stick together and love each other the way only we understand.
I'm an overly expressive and loud autistic individual, pretty hyperactive aswell. I struggle with distinguishing which emotions are other people's and which are my own because of hyperempathy. I mean, I like having lots of empathy because it kinda makes relationships easier, but I'm still kind of rejected by peers at times, or even family, because I can't really control my emotions or tone them down to be calm or whatever that might mean... When I'm not feeling great mentally or when I'm tired, I can barely make any expression, so its a pretty big contrast. Despite having lots of empathy in the more "emotional" side , I REALLY really struggle with understanding points or view or opinions, anything that involves other people's thoughts or experiences. I just literally cannot understand how someone would think something that, in my mind, is overtly wrong and ridiculous.
I love your channel and your videos!!! You illustrate your points clearly and with good arguments, and I love all of that!!!
I'm heavily emotional as an autistic person. No one seemed to understand, or just told me to block them up. I get so overwhelmed yet no one seemed to understand.
Love frizzly, sparkle-brained, and frabbish! Lots of good concepts in that ending section, and those three were especially fitting words
“Folklore” is how I’m sneaking “social construct” into conversation
Yall will be begging for me to go back to the greek/latin terms!!! Here we gooooo!!!
I'm excited to hear what you have to say about autism and emotions.
I never had real big problems with reading people, but I was really training it in my childhood to survive in the world and even now with 44 years, it still is taking up a lot of energy and I sometimes need some days to rest after meeting people. I call it my social hangover. Maybe it would have been less stressfull in my life, if I‘d known that I was autistic, when I was a child, but this revelation happened with 35 and helped me sooooo much since then.
So recognizable, one of the few things that can bring out my emotions is music. And when that happens it goes deep, very very deep.
OVERPEOPLED!! I love this word, it's like a slightly more polite way of saying 'I'm sick of yall freaks'... but only slighty xD
First video I've watched of yours and ma'am you are extremely hilarious. Very grateful the algorithm managed to introduce me to your content, commenting to boost the algorithm and to wish you a good day :)
It's kinda hard to talk about interpretation of emotions without talking about emotional manipulation, especially since you mentionned the Depp v Heard trial (I will intentionally avoid saying which side I'm on because it's directly influenced by personal trauma). So many of us have been taken advantage of or target as the villain of a situation because of someone emotionally manipulating us and others. And it's exactly why so many people get obsessed with interpreting the "true" intent of someone, not just officers trying to put everyone in prison. How many of us thought "if only I could prove without a doubt that this person is bullshitting others into thinking I'm a psychopath or an hysteric monster". How many of us have been abused by people who were just better at making other sympathise for them? But of course the idea that we can prove someone's intent is wrong. I'm just saying that either way, we shouldn't forget that expressions can and will be used as a weapon and shield by the person wearing it too, and trauma also has a significant impact on how someone uses their face to avoid rejection or abuse or ego bruises in a way that the owner themselves won't really be conscious of. Facial expressions are just as messy as the human psyche.