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Facial Expressions in the Autistic World
The characteristics of many interactions typically depend on many factors, one of the greatest being facial expressions. Facial expressions supplement the words we speak, reinforce ideas, and indicate certain emotions, such as confusion, shock, anger, happiness, and many more. However, autistic individuals have a different connection to facial expressions, one that requires a further understanding and review.
Today, we will discuss facial expressions in the autistic world. We will cover three aspects of this subject. First, we will examine the neuroscience behind overall facial expressions. We can compare the neuroscience of autistic individuals and neurotypical individuals to find out what developmental differences exist. That leads to our second point. We will ask why autistic people have difficulty in interpretation. Finally, we will cover different autistic facial expressions.
The Neuroscience Behind Facial Expressions
The basic model of sensory input is sensing an input, processing it, and reacting to it. In our case, the sensory input is the environment and especially faces. Processing it involves reading the face and feeling the emotions present. Finally, reacting to it requires creating a facial expression of our own.
Research suggests that the amygdala, a small part of our brain, performs a key role in processing positive and negative reinforcement and respective environmental stimuli. Its response to faces reflects the differences between neurodiversity and neurotypicality. As with other brain areas, the amygdala receives stimuli, strengthens neural pathways based off of association, and responds to those faces. However, developmental differences in autistic individuals lead to different types of activity in the amygdala after viewing a face. These differences are not understood that much, but are still noted as having a foreseeable impact on interpretation. What you really need to take into consideration is that the impact these differences have is mostly demonstrated in two environments. The first tense environment involves ambiguous faces. Because social cues are so ambiguous, and the ambiguity of the facial expression only complements that, autistic individuals have difficulty making a decision on what the emotion means. The second environment includes high pressure environments. Sensory overload is cumbersome to autistic individuals and compounding it with pressure only worsens the atmosphere.
Let's Address Two Misconceptions
This leads us into two misconceptions. The first misconception is that autistic people have a lower IQ. However, this is simply not true. Despite numerous studies that reject both the reasoning and conclusion of this misconception, what really serves as an obstacle to autistic individuals is the pressure of social environments. In many other areas, autistic individuals can be much more proficient than neurotypical individuals. In these scenarios, any conclusion on IQ just does not make sense. The second misconception is that autistic people lack empathy. The first problem with this is that it conflates empathy into one singular monolithic emotion. Imagine if someone asks what you ate for dinner, and you reply with “food”. The implication is similar. So what is empathy? Empathy comes in two types: cognitive and affective. Cognitive empathy includes many things, however, it primarily includes the recognition of facial expressions. Autistic people cannot convey this type of empathy as much as neurotypical people can. However, affective empathy involves the instinctual feeling of emotions. Recent studies suggest that autistic people feel this more strongly than neurotypical people.
Facial Expressions Common in Autistic Individuals
Finally, let us cover a few facial expressions commonly shown by autistic individuals. The first can be labeled the Flat Affect (with an A). This involves a reduced smile, a monotone voice, and some unexpressed feelings. The second can be termed over expressiveness. Like the name suggests, over expressiveness is when individuals with both autism and ADHD have exaggerated emotions as compared to what society deems to be normal. It is almost the inverse of over expressiveness, but making generalizations like this can be tricky.
Conclusion
So what should you take away? The key thing to understand is that these differences in development within the autistic community are simply differences and nothing more. These differences are not issues to fix, but things to accept.
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