Is there a "right" way to communicate emotion? For many people who have non-traditional methods of communication, it certainly seems that the world thinks so.In this series, I have written of my experiences with members of my family each of whom had unique methods of communicating emotion. Each of them had something to teach me, and others that knew them. Knowing them has transformed my perceptio
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August 12, 2010
July 29, 2010
Poker face science
The best 'poker face' is probably not a neutral expression, but a happy one, as it led to a greater number of opponent mistakes in a study just published in PLoS One.The research looked at how poker playing was influenced by the emotional expression of opponents and discovered that blank and threatening expressions had little effect, but a positive expression tends to lull people into a false sen
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July 20, 2010
Communication and Emotional Expression (Part 3): The Unorthodox Gift
When I think of emotions and emotional expression - I can't help but think of my stepfather. Although he was often a difficult man to read, there's no one in my life who's taught me more about diversity in emotional expression.He was a brilliant man - and loved to talk about intellectually challenging subjects. His most favorite subject was that on which he'd built his career: computers. Dinner c
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July 2, 2010
Communication and Emotional Expression (Part 2): Other People’s Words
"Don't you have any ideas of your own!" an exasperated person once said to my father - an admonishment that seemed particularly unfair. The fact was, my father had plenty of thoughts and ideas, but the challenge was how he communicated them. My father had a way of sharing his own thoughts via other peoples' words.My father's special interest was music, and to a lesser extent, movies. A walking
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June 17, 2010
Communication and Emotional Expression (Part 1): The Female Factor
Expressing emotion - it's an often-cited challenge for those of us on the autism spectrum. Sometimes, it can be hard for others to understand what we're feeling, which may lead to assumptions that we're emotionless...but my experience has been that this is certainly not the case.I've written of a few of my experiences with emotional expression - most notably remorse, a post which generated a grea
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June 16, 2010
Forced smile
Neurology journal Brain had a wide-ranging review of the book 'Insomnia: A Cultural History' last year which has this wonderful part about Darwin, Duchenne and how he electrocuted the face to study emotional expression.In the same era and acting on the same beliefs, many experiments were done to study the effect of electricity on sleep and on the nervous system. Beard and Rockwell (1871) claimed
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