Mind’s eye

I’ve always read into people’s body languages and assumed their responses based on that instead of what they are telling me. I’ve opted out of a lot of things because of this and always held some type of regret about whether or not I made a mistake. There have always been doubts in my mind about my ability to read into people. After all, without actually confirming with the person that I read, there’s no way to know for sure if I was right. Yet, even if they do confirm, you don’t know if they are lying or not.

I no longer doubt myself, after taking this test and scoring 30/36. Which tells me that I have a 83.33% accuracy on reading people’s emotional state. The average is 26 and a person with Aspergers scores 21. You can find the test here: http://www.questionwritertracker.com/quiz/61/Z4MK3TKB.html

The 6 mistakes that I did make are specific to a certain state of a person and affirms with what I understand to be my weakness. The 4 emotions that I wasn’t able to detect were internal states related to a person giving thought to something. These are: Preoccupied, Anticipating, Thoughtful, Pensive. The two other emotion that I got wrong are partly blamed because I used some learned techniques of elimination from college to base my answer on, but also because I wasn’t 100% sure on my read. These are: Friendly and Upset.

When I look back in my life, I do see instances where I have a hard time knowing whether someone is being friendly and when someone is upset about something. While detecting times when they are debating about something within themselves were completely absent. I wasn’t even aware that I can’t see this and always just assumed that it’s an awkward silence or I it’s time for me to show my competence in something. If I believe that I lack empathy (which I do), the diagnosis fits the symptom. While at the same time, I am super alert to any emotional state that is in the form of an interaction. Any hostility, interest or scams directed at me can be instantly detected. I spent less time on these questions.

My real accuracy in life should be higher due to specific trainings I’ve had in lie detection, body languages and ballroom dancing. After all, the emotional state is a continuous dialogue between the person’s story and where the body language disagrees with the story. What I am surprised about is more on the fact that I can read a person’s flirting and interest with just the eyes alone because these are usually accompanied with very unique mouth shapes.

As an engineer, I understand that one test means nothing, but when I engaged my analytical mind to this particular task, I really couldn’t find any clues on some of the images by analyzing the shapes. The fact that I can gauge a whole emotion out of a picture of just the eye’s surrounding is quite amazing and instant. I can only conclude that this is a task that is done in my subconscious and hence should have little variance in similar tests.

If anything comes out of this, it is that I have less regret about my decisions now and more confident in my reading of the situations that I have been in the past.