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
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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”
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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)
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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
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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
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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
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another concrete prediction i’ll stand by is that people can suddenly get much better at reading emotional states (i’ve experienced this), through e.g. therapy, drugs, meditation, in a way that the skill model wouldn’t predict
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idk on the other hand uhhh “empath” 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 “sensitivity” direction and/but that it can get clogged up by trauma
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so i’d be willing to posit some kind of rough distinction between “normal-to-low sensitivity,” “high-sensitivity but ignoring it b/c it’s overwhelming,” “high-sensitivity but not ignoring it and unusually empathic” and i have legit no idea how big these groups are
it's tricky stuff. the first thing you'd want to try is just getting a bunch of random people together and asking them to guess each other's emotional states but the problem is that people often either don't have access to or are pretending not to have their emotional state
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