{"id":1329,"date":"2009-08-07T16:49:01","date_gmt":"2009-08-07T15:49:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=1329"},"modified":"2009-08-07T16:49:01","modified_gmt":"2009-08-07T15:49:01","slug":"body-language-and-autism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=1329","title":{"rendered":"Body language and autism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>According to research reported in <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/health\/8183447.stm\">this article<\/a>, people with autism have difficult interpreting body language, which makes it difficult for them to understand other people&#8217;s emotions. The research used animated clips of figures made up of dots showing emotions which the participants with autism had trouble identifying them correctly. I wonder how they would have fared if real people or videos of real people were displaying the emotions.<\/p>\n<p>On a related note, in Frans de Waal&#8217;s book, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/1573223123\/omniglot-20\"><em>Our Inner Ape<\/em><\/a>, which I read recently, he mentions an American woman with Asperger&#8217;s Syndrome who found she was able to relate better to gorillas than humans and got a job as a gorilla keeper. She found it difficult to deal with direct stares and questions from people, and preferred the way the gorillas were &#8220;looking without looking, and understanding without speaking&#8221;. She was able to understand the body language of the gorillas, and found that they responded to her as well, comforting her when she showed signs of distress.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>According to research reported in this article, people with autism have difficult interpreting body language, which makes it difficult for them to understand other people&#8217;s emotions. The research used animated clips of figures made up of dots showing emotions which the participants with autism had trouble identifying them correctly. I wonder how they would have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animal-communication","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1329\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}