Actor Conrad Veidt in character as Gwynplaine in The Man Who Laughs (1928). Veidt's grinning visage inspired the Joker design.
One of the most irritating things anyone can ask me is to smile. The request itself makes me angry and offends me. It reminds me of my early childhood, and being told by my mother to “give a little laugh”. My mother had this habit of substituting the proper terms for a similar one, frequently with humorous intent but more often than not to minimize an action or an object. Minimizing by nonaggressive ridicule was a favorite of hers.
I’m always sulking or outright angry on childhood pictures. That, of course, got neurotypical adults to criticize me for being bad tempered and too serious. To be fair, I gave them more reasons to be cautious towards me. I’ve never been nice. I was a fair, ethical and coherent child - never a nice one.
But why did I feel so offended when told to smile or, worse “give a little laugh”?
Because I picked up on the dishonesty. Many of us, autistic people, have difficulty in interpreting non-verbal cues and indirect speech. Facial expressions are particularly problematic. We are easily manipulable, we may have a hard time identifying lies and that is one of the reasons we suck at socially skilled behavior. That’s where my mother’s behavior became my first source of knowledge about smiles and deception: if she was insisting so much for me to smile when I felt no reason to do it, she was telling me to fake an emotion. She was telling me to look happy in spite of the fact that I felt miserable or defensive. She was telling me that the appropriate thing to do was to lie, whether to satisfy her friends and relatives or to eternalize a false family happiness in a picture.
I hate smiling. It hurts my face.
The smile is a powerful item in the social skills toolbox: it can be used to regulate a conversation, to convey a welcoming demeanor, to persuade and even to express an actual felt emotion. It is possibly one of the most important non-verbal deceit actions.
Think about the “cheese” command for pictures: you are being told to pretend you are happy so that the static image in the photograph will perpetuate that deceit by tricking God knows how many people into believing they are looking at a happy moment. Profile pictures for institutions are the creepiest thing after dolls for me. Add the fake smile to makeup, concealer, shiny hair and formal dress code and I feel like I’m looking at a mortician shop. Couldn’t be creepier.
I developed a universal mistrust of smiles from as early as I can remember.
There is a problem here: a smile can be a deliberate, voluntary, false expression, recruited with intent to deceive, or it can be the spontaneous expression of joy. Autistic people, or people who score high in the Autism Spectrum Quotient, have an impaired ability to distinguish one from the other. The ability to identify the body expression of a simulated emotional state is analogous to the ability to identify a lie. Or is it?
Actually, there is still no consensual explanation as to what makes it so difficult for those in the spectrum to discern real from simulated states. The first hypothesis is that there is something wrong with our ability to interpret facial expressions. However, someone may score high in the Reading the mind in the eyes (RMIE) task and still be a poor lie detector. Of all the tests available, what can be unequivocally associated with poor lie detection is the Autism Spectrum Quotient.
The eye reading test is considered valuable in quantifying the “mind-reading ability” of a person, and, usually, people in the spectrum score low in this task. However, social skills can be learned and in fact there is significant research about how to teach them to autistic people. I score very high in the autistic spectrum quotient and very low in the empathy scale. However, I score high in the eye reading task. That’s something I’ve also learned as a child.
“Shack eyebrows”, that’s when I started reading eyes. It’s the term I coined for my mother’s sad, sorrowful face. Like a lot of neurotypical people, she expected to be “read” and expected us to respond according to her non-verbalized state. It is possible that her inclined (they looked like the roof of a shack to me) eyebrows were exaggerated because I am not the only autistic person in the family: my father is too.
At a very young age, I noticed that she combined the “shack eyebrows” with a smile. It was undoubtfully a smile but I was supposed to know that she was sad. If I didn’t, then there would be sighs and other expressions of how miserable she was. That was my first lesson on never trusting a smile: it could mean the opposite of joy.
This was her being deliberately transparent (possibly to train her autistic family members). She could be quite skilled at concealing her state, though. And then I had no idea at all about what was going on. I immediately went into defensive mode.
Did my childhood training make me a socially skilled adult? Did it help me choose who to trust efficiently? No, it didn’t. Understanding that a neurotypical person has the ability to deceive effortlessly is only part of learning how society works. It taught me that, usually, these smiling people cannot be trusted. It didn’t help me identify those who could be trusted.
To this day, I don’t like to smile but I learned I must try. It’s one of those skills that I realized I simply had to adopt as part of my camouflage repertoire. They are not convincing smiles, though. Having to smile without a reason to do it spontaneously is exhausting.