I am a mature Psychology master student and had a lecture that explained my problems: People with social anxiety or people who are hypersensitive to threat signals and facial cues that spell rejection are often perceived more negatively (not as negatively as they think they are perceived though!)… And one reason may be that the scanning and introspection and so on use up mental capacity needed for social cue processing and fluid communication.
So I can definitely say that when I look at someone and they say hello and then I abruptly look away and back or I have a delay in my response that they immeditaely have a negative judgement.
Usually this is seen in microexpressions of disapproval…
So.. delay in responsivity is a huge thing.. And in my view it is actually punished by others or interpreted such that there is an attribution error and so on…
Even if you try to be nice, if you have these delays and twitches people will dislike it.
What was your way out of this?