Facial expressions

Have you ever wondered why married couples begin to look like each other over a period of years? Watching couples in their 70s and 80s who have been married over 50 years and they could pass for brother and sister. It is sort of eery and not a little frightening at times. Why does this happen?

It has to do with facial expressions. Years of staring at each other and learning each others face changes and we begin to take on the facial expressions of the partner. This then results in a similar look and response to the same stimuli. While at first married couples retain individuality, eventually the give and take of relationships shows up in a sharing of facial expressions. Fascinating to say the least.

Take a few minutes to think of your own facial expressions in response to certain stimuli. Do you react the same when alone as you do in public? If you are being seen by someone or are in a group, do you demonstrate the same face as you do in private? Doubtful. We are all products of the social environment in which we reside. We may not intend to demonstrate a particular face or respond in a certain way to an external stimuli, but everyone does. Do we react exactly the same way when alone?

Joel does. He does not put on a face to prove his emotion to others. His facial expressions are natural and not contrived in any sense. He is not trying to impress anyone at anytime. He simply acts and looks according to his own inside theater devoid of external pressures of social norms. While sociologists and psychologists disagree about the nature of facial expressions as to whether they are learned, cultural, or innate, the truth is that we respond to others and express ourselves through our faces.

Unknown to him, I watched him one night in his room as he was in bed getting ready to go to sleep. He was talking to himself and obviously concerned about a couple of things. I think I heard something about getting Mexican food and not steak at a restaurant (he always prefers Mexican food over everything else). As he expressed himself, his face did alter some, nothing dramatic but certainly obvious to me. And yet his face did not match his words, at least in the normal social expectations. He registers emotions but it is not easy to tell what the emotion is.

Most of us have developed expressions matching our situation or at least demonstrating what we want others to know. In some instances I might hide my emotion with a false smile or I might even pretend to be upset for a reason (like when my children would sneak cookies before dinner) or I might feign confusion in order for the person to clarify the statement. Yet all these facial expressions are somewhat manipulative or at least artificial to an extent. Other times our faces simply register honest feelings--fear, joy, love, stress, pain, etc.

Yet an autistic person does not benefit from knowing what those faces should be. He does not develop particular expressions to match his emotion. Therefore what you see is what is most likely the most natural, devoid of any kind of social contract theory. It makes for great difficulty in assessing the feelings of the individual.

Joel recently acquired a new cell phone. It is sleek, fancy, full of games, a nice screen, and generally very advanced. He said he liked it and I believed him, but his face did not display that pleasure. We are used to this having experienced years of opening presents without hearing or seeing the joy that normally comes from that. Yet it was a little disconcerting to me. So I asked him forthright if he liked his phone. He said yes and I told him I wish he would express his joy and happiness. He thought for a minute and jumped three times with his hands in the air. That was good enough for me and made me laugh.

We should not be deceived by the lack of "accurate" and expected facial expressions to emotions. Autistics do not and will not respond according to a social norm. But they do experience emotions, strong ones, and they do have joy, sorrow, fear, and a plethora of feelings like any other human. Yet their feelings are not manifested in facial expressions typical of our expectations.

Now let's discuss body language.