ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 first describes the double empathy problem – in which people who have very different experiences of the world may struggle to understand and empathize with each other. This is particularly evident in how autistics and non-autistics use nonverbal communication to augment and clarify their message through both receptive (understanding what the other person is communicating) and expressive (communicating your message to others) channels. The areas of nonverbal communication in which autistic and non-autistic people have different experiences include body positioning, personal space, eye contact and gaze, prosody (including volume, tone of voice, and inflection), facial expressions, and gestures. Speakers must integrate these behaviors with the spoken words, and the listener must decode what each of these behaviors mean in context. Culture can have an impact too, with high-context cultures demanding more facility using and interpreting nonverbal cues than low-context cultures. The authors note that autistic females tend to have more expressive nonverbal communication than autistic males, though they are not necessarily better than males at understanding other people’s nonverbal communication.
