How I explain this learning / cogntive difficulty is that I have poor eyesight and as a baby, never learnt to understand people by looking them in the face (because I couldnt make out facial expressions). This meant I could only understand people through words and tonality. This continued with glasses. I never learnt that phsyically paying attnetion to peope’s faces was how you understood them and so have never been able to emotionally empathise with people. I feel this is similiar to the symptoms of blindness, autism or inattentional blindness. It is an inattnetional blindness of a specific object; faces.
Any comments or insights are welcome