Conversation

when you're feeling poorly, can people around you tell just by looking at you (if you don't make a show of it)?

yes
44%
only close friends/family
31.6%
no
24.4%

291 votesFinal results

i think basically everyone has this ability and lots of people are deliberately refusing to pay attention to it so it’s hard to tell if it’s happening

goblin à la mode

@goblinodds

oof sad i feel like some people are just very expressive when they're ill, though? 🤔 apparently my face just goes blank and i talk less, like i put less effort into being expressive for other people's benefit?

yeah that’s extremely noticeable if anyone would actually bother to notice it at all i went through this transition where i like... gave myself permission to notice other people’s faces and body language and it was horrifying. everyone around me was so anxious and so unhappy

nerds in particular vastly vastly underestimate how transparent their emotional state is to an even slightly practiced observer. it’s just that often the state is “blank and frozen and dissociated” which looks kinda like but is actually completely different from “neutral”

Jakeup

@yashkaf

Contra: the first time I experienced serious anxiety, to the point where I had trouble breathing or keeping my thoughts straights, I was really surprised that none of my coworkers/friends/wife could tell and those I told afterward were shocked to hear that.

i don’t particularly want to fight you about your experience but this is consistent with my “deliberately refusing to notice” hypothesis (although i maybe misphrased it, i don’t necessarily mean consciously)

Jakeup

@yashkaf

Then what could possibly falsify your hypothesis? If the point you're making is that a few specialists are good at reading signs and always pay attention, then sure. But there's little diff otherwise between "most people can't X" and "most people subconsciously refuse to X".

i guess what i’m saying, to back up and be more specific about my experience, is that when i went from being worse at reading people to being better at reading people it did not feel to me like i was learning a skill. mostly it felt like i was unlearning an anti-skill

9:53 PM · Aug 14, 2020Twitter for iPad

Replying to

and

this metaphor overstates it but it’s a little like i grew up in a society that taught me to completely ignore my sense of smell and then i got permission to stop doing that and actually started paying attention to smell data. it was there the whole time

Likes

Replying to

and

a concrete prediction i’ll stand by is that young children are unusually good at reading emotional states compared to what you would expect if you thought it was a skill you had to develop on purpose. similar prediction for dogs and other social animals