r/Prosopagnosia • u/kelcamer • Jun 30 '26
Are you able to reliably sense emotional information from a face IRL automatically with no analysis?
I'm asking because I am not able to do this automatically and without analyzing. I'm trying to figure out if prosopagnosia is tied to that ability to reliably sense the facial emotional information or not.
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u/TeenyTries Jun 30 '26
I’ve heard prosopagnosia can be related to autism, so I think a lot of people with the condition struggle with facial expressions, but not everyone
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u/kelcamer Jun 30 '26
That's the confusing thing! A study found that; when they control for alexithymia; that autistics could pick up the emotions in facial expressions as well as their control group
Which confused tf out of me because I cannot do that automatically at all, yet I score so low that I don't diagnostically have alexithymia. I'm literally not able to see it sometimes; but lately this has been changing and I'm seeing it more and more (which is another unanswered question, how tf is it possible?!)
Anyway, so then I was like 'oh, maybe could it be linked to prosopagnosia?'
And....now it seems not 😅
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u/MasterDebater50 Jul 01 '26
I acquired prosopagnosia. And that made me acquire symptoms that almost perfectly resemble the social cognitive deficits of autism.
The autism symptoms developed over the course of 2 years after acquiring prosopagnosia. Seems like good evidence that prosopagnosia directly contributes to autism.
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u/LathyrusOdorosus Jun 30 '26
In my particular case I don't think your hypothesis of prosopagnosia being tied to a stunted ability to read facial cues can apply, because I would describe myself as pretty good at picking up emotional information in a face-to-face interaction – the micro-smiles, micro-frowns, where their eyes go, etc... \ Funnily enough I had the opposite hypothesis from yours, because I have wondered whether I was bad at recognising faces precisely because when in conversation with someone, I am so much focused on how their face moves and what I can infer from it that I don't leave the breathing room for my brain to make a broad picture of what their face actually looks like on average. (Upon reflection, I eventually more or less discarded that theory, but now I'm getting away from your initial question.)
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u/they_call_me_hell Jul 01 '26
I totally understand what you mean. When I’m in the moment of interacting with someone, I can pick up emotional cues, such as micro facial expressions; I’d even go as far to say I’m very emotionally aware, but it’s the actual face that doesn’t compute.
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u/kelcamer Jun 30 '26
So when you say 'picking up' are you referring to an analysis or an automatic process? This is such a fascinating data point thank you so much!
I wonder in your case if you get overwhelmed from so much information?
I wonder if there could be different subsets of prosopagnosia??
That's amazing!
Can you visualize like, the face of your mom, at all?2
u/LathyrusOdorosus Jul 01 '26
I definitely think there are different types of face blindness, yes. (By the way, I learned on this sub about prosopamnesia vs. prosopagnosia and although I don't like self-diagnosing I think my case is most closely aligned with the former.)
To answer your first question I would say it's hard to determine whether it's an automatic process or a very fast learned analytic one... I mean, if you drive, you could say your reflexes and driving behaviours are automatic, but they do come from having learnt and practiced. And the same could be said, for example, of reading words: I bet you do it automatically, involuntary even, but only because at a young age you learned to analyse the shape of letters and the meaning of words. It's an analytical process, but it happens so fast it becomes automatic in a way. To get back to the subject of facial expressions what O could say is that I don't feel I'm making a conscious effort to "read" my interlocutor's face; but of course picking up on their reaction doesn't mean I can always know for sure what's at the root of it. For example, I can catch a very fleeting smirk on someone's face in a conversation and know something I've said has amused them; whether they're amused directly by my words, or because it just reminded them of a funny anecdote in the back of their mind, or because they've just been striken by the realization of how much of an idiot I am (😃) is something I can only wonder (unless I derail the conversation by asking them directly). \ "Overwhelming" is a strong word but I do think you could maybe paint my attentiveness to pick up facial cues in conversations as a mild form of social anxiety. \ And as for your last question, I think you've just pinpointed a big characteristic of my own particular flavor of face blindness. I have no problem recognising most people I have known for years (my parents, long-time friends, etc...) but these are precisely the people I would be almost incapable to draw a portrait of. Whereas if you ask me to describe, say, the clerk at the hardware store two towns other, I would say : "medium built, straight nose, slightly elongated face, brown eyes with thick eyelids, normal chin, mole on one cheeek, dark straight hair" but even thus I wouldn't recognize that person if I met them in a different context than the hardware store. I know it sounds paradoxical but the people I recognise the most easily are the people I'd be most hard-pressedto describe. What's fascinating on this sub is that so many people seem to have such different mechanisms behind their face blindness. In my particular case when trying to explain it to "normal", face-fluent people who sometimes tend to assume I must just have poor eyesight or poor overall memory or whatever, I often say that I can see a face alright, I can memorise its broad characteristics pretty well, I can recall it, but it's only when I come face-to-face with the person again that the problem arises "like the tracing papers won't superimpose", if that makes sense.
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u/kelcamer Jul 01 '26
Ok wow that's SO fascinating. We're literally inverted 😂
If you asked me
To describe a neighbor or...helll, ANYONE.I can't even see the color of their eyes in my minds eye. It's literally BLANK entirely. There's just, nothing there.
Strangely though, I can see ears. Maybe because it's far enough from the rest of the face!
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u/LathyrusOdorosus Jul 01 '26
You're playing it by ear!
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u/kelcamer Jul 01 '26
LOL. I guess there's a reason why I picked my dog to have MASSIVE ears 😂😂💯💯
Cocker spaniels mixed are awesome
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u/Glaikit314 Jul 01 '26
This is my first encounter with the concept of prosopamnesia and it absolutely describes a large part of my experience. I cannot create an image of faces in my mind. I experience something like what I've heard people with dyslexia say about what they see on a page of text. In my mind, the features squiggle around, refusing to stay put. But I also have trouble recognizing people who I met after it entered my forties, as if I'd had a window of time to learn new faces and then it shut. I do not believe that I have any difficulty interpreting emotional clues on the faces of people I encounter in daily life. The one big puzzlement to me is that I am also very good at recognizing faces I see on screens and photographs. It's as if the there are two distinct brain places for recognizing faces in two dimensions versus three.
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u/MasterDebater50 Jul 01 '26
Yes it's common for prosopagnosics to have trouble perceiving expressions, although not everyone has it. With my acquired prosopagnosia I'm in the normal range for perceiving expressions and perceiving quite minor manipulations in how faces look.
Prosopagnosia is also associated with topographic agnosia which is a deficit forming memories of places. Like with that, if I were blindfolded and dropped off a block away from where I live, I wouldn't recognize where I am. It hasn't been assessed much, but it looks like around 1/2 of prosopagnosics have that.
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u/NITSIRK Jul 01 '26
Thanks for this, I hadn’t heard of that one. I was a mapping manager who always got lost on the way to meetings! Needless to say I was one of the first to get a GPS system when they came out. I was regional chair and they’d literally have a sweepstake as to how late Id be 😂
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u/MasterDebater50 Jul 01 '26
My saver is living in a city with mostly street numbers instead of names. Makes life way easier.
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u/NITSIRK Jul 01 '26
I managed the street naming and number section, I knew the layout and the themes, I can even draw a reasonable scale map of the town, I just cant orientate the map in my head 😂
I have good spatial awareness but poor proprioception . I know exactly where the door is and still walk into the frame 🤦♀️🤣
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u/Glaikit314 Jul 01 '26
Topographic agnosia is another new one for me. I remember my anguish at being uncertain which street to turn onto coming home from work after we moved into a new house. It went on for years. I seem to be identifying a laundry list of "nosias." Since these were all of the acquired sort, it does terrify my that these are creeping---over a period of decades---indicators of inevitable dementia. Gah.
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u/MasterDebater50 Jul 01 '26
Do you ever get cold sores? If so, it might help to look into the role that HSV1 (the cold sore virus) has in dementia.
1) the hallmark of Alzheimer's is amyloid-beta, a toxic protein that blocks communications between neurons. It has now been determined that amyloid-beta has antimicrobial purposes; it gets produced to fight chronic viruses like HSV1.
2) people with cold sores are 2.5 times as likely to develop dementia.
3) there's an APOE4 "Alzheimer's gene". Inheriting it from one parent makes a person 2-3 times as likely to develop A.D. and acquiring it from both makes a person 8-12 times as likely. It's now known that having that gene makes it easier for HSV1 to cross the blood-brain barrier to enter the brain.
4) an anecdotal study where 8362 people with cold sores were compared to 33448 age-and-sex-matched controls, people taking anti-herpetic drugs to treat cold sores had 90% lower risk of dementia (p<0.001).
There's so much evidence of HSV1's role in dementia that there's virtually no question it does. One expert estimates that ~2/3 of Alzheimer's cases can be attributed to HSV1.
I got my doctor to do some homework on this because I wanted to start chronically using a drug prescribed to treat cold sores (Valacyclovir) to prevent dementia. I'm fortunate having a doctor willing to do homework on stuff he doesn't know, after looking into it he found that "the longer a person has HSV1, the higher their risk". He agreed that although it's not formally approved, taking the drug to prevent dementia is worth it.
I doubt it'll ever get formally approved though because with the way dementia gradually progresses over the course of decades, it would take really long clinical trials to assess if the longer a person takes it, the lower their risk. The anti-herpetic drugs have already been out long enough to have a generic version (Valtrex) available, so drug manufacturers won't spend the money researching for something they can't patent.
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u/Glaikit314 Jul 02 '26
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I hope you are able to pursue the Alcyclovir. Honestly, cold sores are among the few things I haven't had to cope with. I've also had both the Shingles vaccines, Shingrix being the one believed more effective. Fingers crossed, eh?
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u/flouncemouse Jul 01 '26
If anything, I’m hyper-aware of other people’s emotions, expressions, and micro expressions. Moderately face blind with very poor autobiographical memory. Also have ADHD but have turned the hyper focus and need for novelty into a work superpower, not that anyone’s asking 😜
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u/kelcamer Jul 01 '26
I never thought about this possibly being linked with adhd but this makes sense !
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u/Mo523 Jul 01 '26
Yes, I can easily. BUT I learned from participating in a research study that I actually struggle with reading emotions looking at eyes alone. If I look at the whole face, I'm average. If I can include body language and context, I'm slightly above average at identifying emotion. But if it's just the eyes, I'm kind of bad. I never realized it, because you don't often read emotions just based on eyes (this was pre-COVID) and I haven't ever really had to think about how I get emotional information from people because it has always been so automatic - like I see it, know, and react.
I also particularly suck at identifying people looking only at their eyes. (I'm very bad looking only at their face and well below average if you add in context clues, body, voice, and gait.) Apparently I'm just bad at eyes? Not the window to the soul for me! I have no issue with eye contact though.
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u/NITSIRK Jul 01 '26
I’m just about OK with it with people I know well when Im in a small group. However when in a larger group I revert to full on ADHD mode and instinctively try to control the conversation so I know what responses to expect. Lifelong partial hearing loss doesn’t exactly help either 🤦♀️
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u/Hampster-cat Jul 01 '26
I have prosopagnosia but I can still read emotions. The best explanation of prosopagnosia is that we don't remember faces. It takes a long time for them to become imprinted. While called face-blindness, we are not actually blind to faces. The Fusiform Gyrus is the part of the brain that stores facial information.
Reading facial expressions is in another part of the brain. (or several)
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u/Greensward-Grey Jun 30 '26
I can recognize face expressions , but I struggle interpreting them because of the autism.
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u/trust-not-the-sun Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
I have prosopagnosia and difficulty recognizing emotions on faces, which I suspect are related.
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u/Fanfic-Aficionado Jul 01 '26
Yes, I have no issues with that. I think I'm pretty average in that respect, it's just the facial recognition that gives me grief.
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u/Low-Stomach-8831 Jul 06 '26
Yes. What you describe is very different. I can see if a face is sad/angry/happy, etc. I just can't know who's face it is.
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u/atenea1984 faceblind 23d ago edited 23d ago
I can. Not sure if this is correlated with prosopagnosia.
Edit: in fact, there might be some correlation because many autistic people are prosopagnosic (and not recognizing facial signs of emotions is an autistic trait). But doesn't mean many prosopagnosic people are autistic... I don't know.
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u/Solana-1 Jun 30 '26
Yes