Hi, my name is Stephanie and today I want to talk to you about autism and eye
contact. But real quick before that, I just wanted to again shout out this
shirt. I feel like I did this last video but I don't remember. Also, I have a
Facebook page now. I used to not. I tried it for like a millisecond and now I have
it and I've been posting a lot of my older videos on there as well as my new
videos as they come out. So, if you want to follow me on Facebook, you can go
ahead and do that. The link is in the description. So, eye contact is typically
something that is a major point of consideration for professionals when
they are looking at possible autism. It's like one of the big things that they put
on the little mini checklists of whether your child could possibly be autistic: do
they struggle with eye contact? See, the problem here is that it's so
stereotypically known that autistics tend to have issues with eye contact
that a lot of professionals will dismiss children, teens, and adults who are
capable of maintaining some form of eye contact because they believe that all
autistics cannot keep eye contact, when that's simply not true. However, for most
autistics, they do report that eye contact is difficult. It might not come
as naturally. A lot of times, autistics are trained to maintain eye
contact anywhere on the spectrum. And while this can seem beneficial because
eye contact is considered a very important
nonverbal communication skill and a social skill for interacting with others.
A lot of autistics say that this can be harmful or even borderline abusive. Now,
while I don't know that I would take it to that extent, I do want to explain to
you why some autistics have the kind of difficulty that they have with eye
contact through both self-report and a scientific reason why this might be
happening. Many autistics report that eye contact
can literally be physically painful for them.
Others feel overwhelmed, especially those who are
very sensitive to others. It does turn out that a lot of autistic people are
highly sensitive and not able to regulate that kind of thing, so looking
someone in the eye, which is, for many reasons, traditionally known as the
window to the soul, you're getting a lot of that person and if you're highly
sensitive to that, that can be really difficult and really overwhelming. So,
there's a lot of self-report on that. A lot of autistics who aren't
traditionally good at eye contact can kind of swing to the opposite in their
attempts to do this right the social way. And instead of just like doing the
normal amount, whatever that is, of eye contact, we get this: Hi, my name is
Stephanie. [whispers] I'm making good eye contact. And see, with this difficulty, whether it is physically painful or just
awkward and unnatural for the autistic, this can often overtake the conversation
on the autistic's side. Have you ever thought so much about what you're gonna
say to somebody that you have no idea what they just said? So, sometimes, they'll
do those things where they're like, "oh, go greet your neighbor, blah, blah, blah," and you're
just thinking, "My name is Stephanie. My name is Stephanie. My name is Stephanie,"
and they say their name and you're just ready: "My name is Stephanie," and you have
no idea what they said their name was. You just pretended you heard them and
you were just thinking over and over, "My name is Stephanie." Well, that kind of
phenomenon happens a lot with autistic individuals with eye contact. "Make eye
contact. Make eye contact. Make eye contact. Make eye contact. Make eye
contact," and the rest of the information is gone. I don't know your name. I don't
know what we're talking about. I don't even really know what I'm looking at
other than I'm staring into your eyes because this is social skills! And it's
it's definitely one of those unpleasant kind of things. Now, on a personal note, I
think that in general, I do pretty good with eye contact, but I have had a
history of trouble with eye contact. I do remember specifically
an interaction with my husband before we were even dating where he noticed my
lack of eye contact and tried to encourage eye contact there,
which was super awkward because I also liked him. So, like, looking him in the eye
while liking him was also really difficult. So, something I have noticed
and maybe this is normal to everybody, I have no idea. When I'm trying to explain
things or, like, I guess, access memory, I do look away, but here, where I look back
at you, a lot of the times I'm not always going to do that in an actual eye
contact, person-to-person situation. So, if I'm listening to you, I was always taught
as a child, you always look at the person speaking. That's what you're supposed to
do. That's the good thing to do and I always wanted to please people. I always
wanted to be the good kid, follow the rules, that kind of thing. And so I always
watched my teachers. I don't know that I looked at them in their eye, but I mean,
they're far enough away, so it's not awkward, you know. I experienced issues
with recognizing faces, which I think can be partially attributed to not always
looking people in the face. A lot of my memories as a child, I don't always
remember faces. I remember things and things being said to me. So it's very
possible that I didn't make a lot of eye contact and that might have contributed
to a little bit of very minor face blindness. That's something I'll probably
go into in a different video. But when I am talking out of, like, a lot of emotion
or trying to access information that's just not really easy for me to just get
out, I tend to look away. A lot of times, it's, like, over here and I will focus on
an object and it's a lot easier to talk. But what's great about YouTube is that
you are the object. This lens in front of me is the object. So, it's not so hard all
the time to make eye contact with the camera lens, but in person, a lot of times,
I can look at you, especially as long as, like, I'm not ashamed, I guess, or scared
of what you're going to say to me. But if I'm talking, it's not extremely likely
that I will maintain eye contact and I don't know if that's a normal thing or
not. I know that I've definitely tried to do the eye contact thing but it's so
hard because when you're not used to making excessive amounts of eye
contact, you don't have a good idea of how long other people make eye contact.
Because the reality is, most people really don't do this the whole time, even
though that's kind of what they want from autistic individuals when they're
teaching them eye contact. Which is really weird, so. Now, I've heard from
other autistics that they they didn't know that this was abnormal, and their
way of making eye contact while not actually making eye contact was to look
at people's lips when they talked or look at their eyebrows, look at something
that's not actually their eye that's in their face region so that they felt like
they were being made eye contact with them, but they really weren't quite doing
that. These are things that as autistic individuals, we find pretty normal but
others are surprised to find out that we're not always looking right in your
eye. But I suspect that might be because a lot of people overemphasize eye
contact, but that's a personal thing, let me get back, ... let me get back on
track here. So while, maybe, I can't connect to this on the level that some others
can when it comes to eye contact, this has been something I've heard a lot
about. Again, it's one of the main things that professionals are going to be
looking for to see if the person is autistic or not. And I've also heard a
lot of self reporting about how it's just too much to, like, connect with
people with direct eye contact. And while I've heard these things, I haven't really
heard a scientific reason for why this might be. So, in that vein, one day I was
just thinking about one of the stims that I've seen children do before. It's
just that I saw children doing it; it's not that adults can't do it; it's just I
haven't seen adults do it personally or noticed it. But what they would do is
they would move their face and I think what they're doing is moving things into
their peripheral vision. Because they're, like, doing this thing and they're
smiling. It's so cute. And they're, like, moving and they're like and they'll kind
of look at you through their peripheral or they'll look at whatever they're
wanting to look at through their peripheral vision. I thought that was
really interesting, the kind of sensations that we kind of mess
with that are interesting to us that give us maybe a different sensation than
the typical person. And then I was thinking about how a lot of autistics
actually report having excellent peripheral vision. Can't relate as I am a
glasses wearer and my peripheral vision becomes significantly sketchy
once I pass, like, this part of my lens. But some people really do and report
that that's why they're paying attention to you but might not seem like they're
looking at what you want them to look at because they can see it through their
peripheral vision, but they're not going to turn their whole, like, body to look at
that. So, that was just something I was thinking was kind of interesting and
then I came across this article that talks about the sensation of feeling
like people are staring at you. And this has been a thing, obviously, people have
been kind of interested in. Everybody feels at some point that they're being
watched or looked at or whatever and they were looking into why that might be.
But this particular article gave me information that, to me, helps completely
explain why autistic people might have trouble with eye contact. So, this article
describes a 2013 study that they did with a man who is cortically blind. And
what they did was they presented images and some images have what appears to be
a person staring at him and some images have what appears to be a person looking
past him. Now, again, he is cortically blind. What that means is that he can't
see in the traditional sense because, I believe, something with the occipital
lobe is messed up so he's not going to actually see an image. But his eyes are
still giving his brain information. So, they did this specifically with
cortically blind because of that information. They wanted to see if he's
able to tell that someone is looking at him without actually seeing them looking
at him, if that makes sense. Now, he couldn't explain it, but they were
also, of course, looking at his brain and what's happening in his brain while this
is happening. And when he was presented with the images of people looking at him,
there was a spike in activity in his amygdala. So, there's information other
than just plain old visual information coming into our eyes. Our
eyes are telling us more than just the picture. So, this makes a lot of sense
because, if you didn't know, the autistic brain is quite unique and there
are so many unique sensitivities, so many different things that happen in the
autistic brain that might not happen in your typically developing brain. And even
from autistic to autistic, you're going to have different types of
sensitivities, different types of things that are, I don't know, feel good or feel bad
or overwhelm or don't overwhelm that particular individual. Which would
explain why some people don't have that much of an issue with eye contact
compared to others who literally feel pain looking someone in the eye. Now, the
amygdala, which is what is having that activity spike when someone is looking
you in the eye, presumably, from the study, is something that responds to threat and
arousal. It's actually connected to a lot of different parts of your brain but has
a very primary role in fear. It helps you to recognize the expressions of other
people and I believe it recognizes your own feelings, but from my understanding,
although the amygdala can assist in those things, it is very primarily for
fear. The perception of fear in others and in yourself. Now, to me, this is
actually pretty groundbreaking information, just to put together. Maybe
people have already talked about this. Maybe everyone knows this. But I
certainly hadn't heard of it and it sure makes sense that someone who already has
a different way of interpreting information received from the world
inside of their brain to have an issue with their amygdala and how that works
with understanding the expressed emotion on others. A lot of autistic people have
alexithymia, I'm probably saying that wrong, which is difficulty, I believe, in
being able to identify and maybe know what they're feeling, if that makes sense.
Or when they're feeling something, not always being able to give a name to it,
those sorts of things. In this case, think about it. If someone processes their
perceptions of the world differently. Or maybe just like pretend you turned up
the volume of the world. While someone, normally, looking someone in
the eyes has a spike in the amygdala activity which is dealing with fear
primarily, imagine that level going up more. It becomes literally scary for that
person to look someone in the eye. And it's not because they're being rude. It's
not because they're trying to act like they don't care about somebody.
They're not being lazy. They're not being, I don't know, whatever words people come
up with for someone who doesn't make eye contact.
Being shifty or whatever. It is literally fearful and some people might be
translating that inside as painful to look someone in the eye because there's
actual information and sensations happening when you make eye contact with
someone. So, I thought that was interesting because a lot of times
therapies will try to make sure that an autistic individual will make eye
contact because it's an important part of social communication. However, I think
we should be careful in pushing that because when you're doing a social
situation already, this is uncomfortable anyway. Trying to remember how to act, how
to stand, what to say, etc. is very difficult. So, trying to add
on look at this complete stranger, this new information I'm going to be getting
from this complete stranger, making eye contact with a new sensation of a
stranger. That's scary. That is out of their control scary, maybe even painful.
And we just stand here, "Well, you should just remember. Look. Where their eyes? Look.
Look, look, look, look!" Like, that's, I think it's just a
misunderstanding of the autistic experience. So, I highly recommend that if
you are a parent or someone who works with autistic individuals, take into
consideration the actual reality behind what's happening inside the autistic
individual when going through things like this. Some people would highly
benefit from not being forced to make eye contact. And in the case that it's so
immensely important some people, say, like, it's so important for their culture, like
it's insanely important and people just aren't going to understand, at least you
try to meet some middle ground. Because... maybe explaining, "Hey, look at their nose
instead. Hey, look at their eyebrow instead. I know it's really hard to make
the eye contact, can you maybe look here, look there, look there. Somewhere near the
person's eye just to at least alleviate that." I know looking at faces is already
intimidating for some people, but maybe if you can kind of meet halfway in the
cases where it's that important to people that their child makes some sort
of eye contact. Because a lot of people will kind of learn to trick the system
by doing that, but a lot of these children and others are being taught you
have to look directly in someone's eye. When, again, we're finding scientifically
there's reasons why this is so difficult for people who have sensory processing
disorder and autism and such. So, just keep that in mind, please be respectful
of individuals, whether they make eye contact or not. It's not always because
they don't respect you. Because a lot of people try to put that meaning on them.
For someone who doesn't do social cues very well, it's really absurd for us to
expect them to be showing that level of social meaning. So, when we say, you know,
"Oh, that person's not looking me in the eye," and clearly they don't seem to
understand social cues in general, they're not trying to send you a social
cue message of, "I don't respect you," because they clearly aren't really
familiar with social cues in general, if that makes sense. Anyway, so I was just
hoping that we could have a little bit of a better understanding of why autism
and eye contact might be a thing. Maybe you have more information on this, but
this was just something that, you know, when your brain connects two concepts
together and you're like, oh, that makes sense! That's what happened to me and I
wanted to share it with you guys. So, again, please be respectful of people
if they don't make eye contact. It's probably for a good reason. It's not
because they're being jerks. And please, caretakers, parents, teachers, therapists,
whatever, please keep in mind that many people on the spectrum do experience
an overload of this particular sensation. Anyway, thank you so much for watching
this video. I know it's probably a long one. I got rambly again went off-script.
I did weird stuff, as in, like, pretty much nothing with my hair today and my
apologies. This video is gonna have to like really go quickly through the
process because otherwise you won't have a video and that won't be very cool. So,
anyway, if you enjoyed it, go ahead and give it a thumbs up. Let me know your
thoughts about all this in the comments below, if you've ever heard of this
sensation, why this might be a thing, if you heard any other information that
would be interesting for us to know about. Also, I do upload to this channel
every Thursday at 4:00 p.m. Central Standard Time to the best of my ability.
So, if you're interested in autism related content from me, go ahead and
hit that subscribe button. I hope that you're having a wonderful week and see
me in my next video. Bye!