I force myself to look at people, and am actually quite good at it, but it still makes me wildly uncomfortable to stare into someone's eyes. When I have the option, I look away. When there's no option, I lock my eyes on and try not to think!
:roll: <-- must be an aspie emoticon, he's looking away!
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The problem is that I cannot decipher the information in the eye and facial expressions - so really - I am not getting anything out of it and I lose interest in doing it.
This sounds terribly familiar. Not only does the eye contact mean nothing, so does body language.
I hardly display body language myself during conversations, simply sitting still and listening, sometimes making eyecontact, whenever I feel it's nessecary. NT's tend to complain about how little body language I display, thinking I don't care about the subject we happen to discuss. It's annoying. Apparently to them 'looking like you care' and actually caring are inseperable.
I also get complaints about 'mean looks' that I give people, looking at them from the corners of my eyes. Like I said, to me it means nothing, yet to them it's a apparently a very big deal. If they find it so problematic, why don't they just say so?
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I got told by my TKD instructor that I had "weak eyes" because I don't look at anything in particular when I practice, especially while doing the forms. A bit frustrating, but not his fault at all.
Funny, but my fencing maitre instructed us to "not look at anything in particular", so long as we did not handicap ourselves by so doing and so long as we maintained focus. Visual focus on anything was deemed to be a "tell" (betrayed your intent) or it reduced your ability to react to peripheral cues.
I find SoccerFreak's advice very similar to the tactics that I've learned to use myself. I don't like doing it, but will when it's important that I convey my emotional/social normality to someone, generally someone I need to impress. This topic has been on my mind a lot lately as I've been job-hunting and going to interviews. I think I do okay, but I really have no way of telling how normal I pass myself off as. When I'm with friends, I must admit that I don't make much eye contact at all. I don't think I ever have, so I assume these people are just used to me and my mannerisms.
I have clear memories of my father saying "Look me in the eyes when I'm talking to you!". I don't remember it being unpleasant, and I'm sure at one time or another someone used their hands to orient my face to focus on them.
I too have this memory, from plenty of different occasions, but unlike Nix's experience, my recollection of it is generally unpleasant. I think it quite aggravated my father that I didn't like to look him in the eyes. I doubt he was observative enough to notice that it wasn't just him with whom I wouldn't make eye contact, but again this situation often arose under unpleasant circumstances, when I was being disciplined. I threw notoriously violent tantrums, which I'm sure didn't help things.
As a final note, I also tend to lose track of the conversation, or at least the flow of it, if I focus too much of my attention on eye contact as well, as I saw a few others mention. What with the rarity of my making such contact, this situation essentially only arises with my significant other, or perhaps close friends. With interviewers I'm generally too ramped up to forget to focus on their questioning. Of course, I've only had three interviews so far, and no offers. They've been learning experiences in interaction.
The main issue with eye contact is that NT's associate telling the truth with being able to look straight in the eye, and lying with looking away.
Not entirely. Looking away can also be associated with trying to recall information. I was told that if you look to one side it's associated with recalling, and looking to the other side is associated with lying... unfortunately I can't remember which is which. And no, I don't know who made those rules, and yes, they are silly.
random thoughts on eye contact. [please pardon poor spelling]
old stuff: old testamet , a woman is mentioned who " controlled people with her prayers, and with her eyes "
even nts are ambivalent about eye contact. torturers, for instance, are taught to pretend to hold eye contact, while actualy focusing between their preys eyes.
some things may only be notacable if the eye area is being watched. dentists, i am told, are trained to observe between the eyes, on order to monitor patient pain. in pain, there is a inhalation, and skin between eyes contracts and wrinkles. surprise, however, [which does not need more pain controll] causes an inhalation and the eyes widen ,skin between them stretches and smooths.
a true smile ,so i have read, is acompanied by crinkling of skin at outer corner of eyes. fake smile doesnt, aparently musells responsable are not under concious control.
some truly weird stuff. if i remember this right,eyes flash in a caracteristic direction depending on mental processing:
up and to right:acsessing visual memory
strait right:acessing auditory memory
down right:acessing inner aditory dialog
up and to left:constructing new visual memory [ ? imagining ?]
strait left: constructing new verbal memory { ? preparing to lie ? ]
down left:acsessing kinestatic memory [? feelings being evoked ? ]
if any of this is true, then a carefull observer might be obtaining an impressive amount of knowledge about the person whose eyes they are watching. SPOOKY . does any one have any information on this stuff???
asd visual avoidance might be an atempt to avoid giving ones self away. people tend to use this information [ if thats what it is ] in not entirerly benign fashion.
in the nonindustrial setting, hunters and outdoors people learn to use peripheral vision to detect things that direct looking misses. asd gaze avoidance might indicate someone trying to make more sense out of something then the enviroment is providing.
i hold with the idea that western insistance on eye contact is simply due to people forgetting that they are being rude.
I have Aspergers Syndrome. And i find it extremely difficult to give any eye contact at all but the thing that annoys me about it is that they say i wish he would stop looking at the wall and look at my eyes.
Amount of eye contact is entirely culturally dependent (cf English comments about "shifty foreigners" who won't look them in the eye) so there really is No Excuse for NT's to get their knickers in a twist, and no reason to subject aspie kids to "intervention" programmes like that.
What if the kids are english?
You are expected to conform to the culture you live in, not just mix and match the ones you feel like. So you can see why they get their knickers in a twist.
Personally I just can't trust/ get on with people who don't look me in the eye. It annoys me.
I think I have Asperger's, but need to ask my therapist tomorrow (who's got me at OCD and something else not quite known), but I really relate to this stuff.
I guess then, its a question of drawing the line perhaps? For one I think much eye contact or expectance of it is just rude and there is waaaaay too much emphasis on it. An occasional glance in the eyes of acknowledgement seems fine. I hate it when my bf turns my head to him when I'm the one talking- he's trying to help but its really annoying. If I'm the only one there, then who else would I talk to?! I like to look at interesting things around rooms when I talk or listen, then again I don't always pay attention. But anyway, its not life threatening to look, so I could do it if I tried, but I really don't like it, instinctually avoid it, and there's often no point for me (I want those laundromat customers in and out efficiently so I can do the mandatory cleaning, and I'm not at college to socialize or getting paid to by my teachers).
That's where its weird I guess- who is expected to "put up" when on either end its an anxiety-producing experience, but not the worst. Yet I don't usually care to try.
My mom (and many) say that the "eyes are the window to the soul" (and Mom suggested that maybe my avoiding eye contact was a subconscious way of hiding myself, or aspects, from others). That kind of confused me, because I can see the expressiveness of the folding skin around and of the lids and eyebrows, and fear and such can change the pupil size, but I don't know about that soul thing other than that. I've gazed into my bf's eyes and would notice the beautiful subtle structures of the irises with that one greenish thread that circled around near the edge, but as far as the pupils... I'd say that I saw me in them (my reflection was in the way, though its not abstractly incorrect if we're gazing for love :wink: since we see many aspects of ourselves in the eachother).
Maybe the soul thing is the fact that often sight is treated as the most important sense (good for reading and judging surroundings fast), so if your consciousness percieves itself foremost as an animate sense of sight, and presuming the other person percieves foremost from their eyes, then you're sort of staring right back into their consciousness. I find that idea more romantic than the actual opaque black pupils, but irises are prettier, and more gaze-worthy anyway. Of course seeing yourself reflected back in the eyes of your lover is a conceptually interesting idea too.
When I was a kid, I rarely made eye contact because it was useless(it had no purpose for me) and it was a little uncomfortable. I also didn't know where to look. Left eye? Right eye? Middle? People expect to look at both eyes at the same time but I didn't understand that. Then I found out that people think someone who doesn't make eye contact has low self esteem. So I just started to stare into one of their eyes while they're talking. When someone is talking to me, as soon as I start staring into one of their eyes, they either look away, and/or they start talking like "err" as if they forgot what they were saying. Who is the one with low self esteem now? :razz:
Not having eye contact with who I am speaking to makes me feel decidedly uncomfortable and this is true also for most normal people.
Your example doesn't fit because
a) it is obvious if a person is disabled and they may not be aware you have difficulty and
b) standing does not have the emotional impact of eye contact. Eye contact is part of the communication, and you lose a significant part of the communication by not having it. That and body language/tone of voice difficulties mean you may only be communicating and reading 20% of what a normal person would be.
That is bound to be a problem.