The color photo, it looked like maybe you were looking at something away from the camera, but I wasn’t as confident in my interpretation.

I photograph nicely in posed photos. In candid ones, I tend to just look very intent on whatever it is I’m looking at or doing. I also sometimes practically bore holes through other people’s heads with my gaze (staring) at times, if I’m really focused on them, and it bothers a lot of people if I do that to them. The rest of the time, I’m cautious and careful about eye contact — I’ll look at people’s eyes but try not to make too much contact. At the point where it is about to get uncomfortable, I look just slightly away from their eyes.

If the other person is far enough away and people can generally tell what you’re looking at from your gaze, lipreading can look like intense eye-contact interest. (My husband has mild CAPD and uses lipreading to help with understanding the other person. There are a lot more misunderstandings in the car than over dinner, so I tend to start zoning out in the car more, or if I’m driving, focus more on the road.)

I have a friend who is blind, and the eye thing is a little weird, but I don’t have to make eye contact with him and he has a very expressive voice, and the combination makes for someone I like spending time with. Yes, I’m glad to see him because I like him (I first “met” him through online communication) but also because I can relax certain social demands and not seem weird to him. It’s also nice to be around someone who really doesn’t care what I look like. If I have a geeky t-shirt I’ll describe it to him, but that’s about as far as it goes. (And that’s mostly because if I have a geeky t-shirt on, I want everyone to know just exactly how geeky and in what direction I am.)

I took a picture of another autistic woman who visited recently, and she struck a pose with her wooden map of Russia. That’s the sort of thing I would have trouble doing: I don’t really strike poses, I more just settle into one of the fairly limited amounts of postures I use in everyday life to begin with.

I don’t even really have the “public display mode” that one autie I know wrote about. I’m just kind of there, and the main difference in my appearance from private to public is that in public I try really hard to keep all of my clothing on.

With the color photo there couldn’t be any “fair play” first impressions (except that you look nice), because we figured it was you getting your picture taken in the same way you made the video about typing without looking at the keyboard.

In childhood we got remarks like “don’t look so angry” from teachers when we were paying attention to what they were saying, and might have looked, for all we knew, interested or even enthusiastic instead. The worst of the bullying we experienced seems to have been somehow connected (aside from “odd behavior” of course) with our face; anything perceived as unusual about it is probably in what it does (or doesn’t) rather than in its physical qualities. There isn’t anything physically unusual about our eyes either, as far as I know.

Some of us can observe from the physical look of people’s eyes that something is wrong (this presupposes of course that they look at people’s eyes at all), but we usually have to ask “are you sad, stressed, tired, or ill?” unless there are clear behavioral indicators to help narrow it down.

We also know of an instance where the unusual movements of someone’s eyes and head were entirely ascribed to that person’s physical disability, when it was actually typical autistic avoidance of eye contact. I’m guessing that people’s ideas about your eyes probably differ a lot based on whether you’re in your wheelchair or not.

It’s very interesting to me that these postures would stand out less in a country with less food and more heat. I think I do them for the same purpose (conservation of energy and effort), but different specific reasons.

In Western culture, we tend to prefer the vigourous, dynamic agent. Firm handshake, upright posture and all that.

In Nigeria (I lived there four years), where all that tension and vigour would be a waste of scarce calories and generate unwanted heat in a hot climate, people are much more relaxed. While most Canadian NTs would expect someone to stand up, look you in the eye and shake your hand firmly, a Nigerian is likely to remain seated with her head propped up on her arm, more or less looking toward you, as she proffers one limp hand to be shaken.

Many Canadians would interpret this not as frugality, but as laziness and inattention.

Amanda has a frugal-type body posture. She uses support (floor; elbows on knees) and has a facial presentation that could be unkindly described as “slack.” For me, this overall picture suggests someone who isn’t particularly present in her own body or for the other people with her, whether because she’s daydreaming or incapable of thought. Eye gaze is interpreted in this overall context.

Of course, knowing better, I can make a point of disregarding certain signals and focussing on other ones. But people have to know better to do that… otherwise they will defer to their unconscious readings.

We have some firsthand experience with people’s perceptions of our eyes going from thoughtful to blank. People commented on our “thoughtful” stare as an infant and thought we were making eye contact (although, if they were looking us right in the eyes, I suspect what they interpreted as us looking back at them was probably much more of a deer-in-the-headlights thing). At approximately age 9, people suddenly began to perceive our eyes, even when we were focusing on objects around us, as “spazzing” or “blank” or “lights on, no one home.” It became a frequent subject of bullying. As far as I can tell to this day, absolutely nothing about us or the way we looked at people had changed. Maybe it was yet another one of those things that looked endearing, cute, or mystical in childhood but embarassing and inappropriate in someone older.

We frequently seem to confound people who insist that they can judge someone’s mental state just by looking into their eyes, either psychically or through cold reading. I wonder if it’s more likely that people in cultures where eye contact is routine tend to express emotions in a “readable” way through their eyes, whereas people in cultures where eye contact isn’t universally acceptable may express their emotional state through other means. As far as I know, there haven’t been any cross-cultural studies on that. Anyway, we’ve had several people insist that they knew when we were paying attention or not paying attention, whether we had been sleeping or not, whether we were lying or not. “I can see it in her eyes.” The majority of the time, whatever they were seeing in our eyes was something they had projected there themselves– especially the ones who insisted they could see whether we were being truthful or not.

A lot of people have focused on our having larger-than-normal eyes– that was another one of the things that was cute in childhood, but ended up making our face look ‘weird’ and ‘unbalanced’ in adulthood (especially since we have some other minor facial differences that seem to add together for a lot of people to form an overall look that’s slightly “off”). We’ve had some people, including an optometrist, comment on our pupils being unusually dilated (they were apparently enough so for the optometrist to examine our eyes without having to put drops in to dilate them first).