i think basically everyone has this ability and lots of people are deliberately refusing to pay attention to it so itās hard to tell if itās happening
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i feel like some people are just very expressive when they're ill, though? š¤ apparently my face just goes blank and i talk less, like i put less effort into being expressive for other people's benefit?
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yeah thatās 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 peopleās faces and body language and it was horrifying. everyone around me was so anxious and so unhappy
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nerds in particular vastly vastly underestimate how transparent their emotional state is to an even slightly practiced observer. itās just that often the state is āblank and frozen and dissociatedā which looks kinda like but is actually completely different from āneutralā
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i donāt particularly want to fight you about your experience but this is consistent with my ādeliberately refusing to noticeā hypothesis (although i maybe misphrased it, i donāt necessarily mean consciously)
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i guess what iām 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
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this metaphor overstates it but itās 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
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a concrete prediction iāll 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
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another concrete prediction iāll stand by is that people can suddenly get much better at reading emotional states (iāve experienced this), through e.g. therapy, drugs, meditation, in a way that the skill model wouldnāt predict
idk on the other hand uhhh āempathā discourse has gotten obnoxiously poisoned lately but there does seem to me to be something to the idea that people vary a lot along some kind of āsensitivityā direction and/but that it can get clogged up by trauma
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so iād be willing to posit some kind of rough distinction between ānormal-to-low sensitivity,ā āhigh-sensitivity but ignoring it b/c itās overwhelming,ā āhigh-sensitivity but not ignoring it and unusually empathicā and i have legit no idea how big these groups are
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