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.
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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
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how do we study this, i need answers
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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
which means it's somewhere between rude to destabilizing to try verifying whether anyone's guess is actually correct
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i have been in social contexts where it's socially acceptable to say things like "i see a lot of pain in your eyes" and even then it's an extremely charged thing to say! you can completely change someone's concept of themselves
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