And the fact that you have predictably elicited strong feeling in someone else may be more rewarding than the fact that the feeling is hostile or distressing. People with TFAS may seem uncannily good at winding others up, but they have had plenty of opportunity to learn how to do this. What they cannot so easily do is to participate emotionally themselves in the social encounter. They learn about social situations, rather than learning in them. This problem may be associated with other difficulties, like an impaired ability to tell yourself the story of how another person will look at a behaviour, and like the tendency to lump everyone together in the same group of people who are against you.
More research needs to be done to find out what the difficulties are precisely.
Sometimes parents will confirm that they have noticed the difficulties in this area that their son or daughter has. More often, it has not been noticed before. This is not surprising. It is very hard to spot that someone, say, thinks that you are angry whenever you look disgusted or that you are surprised whenever you look frightened. However, a consequence of the fact that other people do not notice the problem is that the person with TFAS is more likely to conceal their difficulties too.