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Comment by Kaiyou | Hacker News Reader

What's the point of knowing someone is angry if you do not know why he is angry? Detecting emotions doesn't strike me as particularly useful. Manipulating emotions of others on the other hand,...

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Knowing someone is angry allows you to act accordingly.

If you don't know someone is sad how do you console them?

There's a great comedy on Netflix called Atypical, one of the things the main character deals with in this show is his inability to read peoples emotions.

That you think a sad person needs consoling reveals your lack of understanding of the problem. It wouldn't occur to an autistic person to console someone who is sad. The ability to read emotion isn't useful on its own. You also need to know how to react to this emotion. Knowing someone is angry won't help you if you have no idea how to defuse this anger. Social interactions do not make sense for autistic people and need to be learned like a foreign language. It's like writing a computer program. You have to be very precise when telling a computer what to do and the same goes for autistic people. You can't just tell them someone is angry and expect them to know what to do. Or when someone is sad, even if you tell them that they have to console such a person, they'd have no idea what consoling even is and how to do it.

See this is the problem a lot of children on the spectrum don't know how to react (or will react in an atypical fashion) ... You need to train interactions (and changes in emotions during communication).

There might be something useful coming out of it, yet it might also do more harm than good.

It's a start. You're unlikely to learn why somebody is angry unless you know that somebody is angry. And humans are very good correlators. If me doing X repeatedly leads to immediate anger, I'll learn not to do it even if I don't understand why.

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