#Basic questions autism social skills how to

What visual, auditory, somatosensory, or interoceptive processes does it take to observe, integrate, and rapidly respond to other peoples' facial expressions, gestures, and other movements? If someone has a deficit in one or more of these, can they make up for it and still achieve social success, and if so, how?ĥ) What perceptual, cognitive, motivational, emotional and other information do we integrate when deciding how to act during a real-time social interaction? How much information do we have to integrate, and how much occurs on any sort of conscious level?Ħ) What relationship does emotional empathy-the ability to feel another person's emotions or pain-have to social success? Does it help, hurt, have no systematic effect, or have some more complex relationship that depends on other factors?

Social interactions are likely to be even more complex because we lack even this control. When we read, we are at least can control how fast we read, and can stop and start at will. what the letter 'b' sounds like), remember words and their rich associations, and build these already very complex word representations into sentences, ideas, and narrative.

Most of us realize that reading requires us to do a lot of sophisticated things: perceive and recognize symbols in the appropriate order, move our eyes in a coordinated way across the page, call up the appropriate phonological associations (e.g. This may be false, but implies the relationship between theories of mind and social success may be more complex than is often supposed.Ĥ) What perceptual abilities are necessary for social success? What perceptual abilities are helpful, but not necessary, for social success? But does it help at all? In my completely anecdotal experience, high intelligence tends to lead to more elaborate explicit theories about others' minds, but lower social success (except around others with similarly high intelligence). If explicit 'theory of mind' alone produced social success, most people with Aspergers would be social geniuses, and many NTs would be social dunces. If this is true, we should be wary both of exaggerated claims about our own 'mind reading' capabilities and autistic peoples' social cognition deficits.ģ) We have fairly sophisticated concepts about our own and other peoples' minds, but how much do these actually influence our real-world social behavior? Does it matter whether these concepts are implicit or explicit? Do people with more elaborate explicit theories of other people's minds have better, worse, or no difference in their social success? We assume that neurotypicals have knowledge about other people's mental states that others do not have, but do they? Maybe they're as clueless as autistic people, but they have better procedural abilities-e.g., automatic facial expressions and gestures, approach/withdrawal behaviors, mirroring others' actions, and timing. We've assumed that they have extremely accurate 'mind reading' ability, but everyday experience and certain lab experiments would suggest that we are quite inaccurate, sometimes approaching chance. For clinical researchers trying to develop social skills programs, it determines what behaviors to teach.Ģ) How much does the average neurotypical adult actually understand about other people's thoughts, feelings, and motivations? How much better are they than chance? What do they understand that an autistic person does not? In diagnostic research, this may affect the characteristics by which we recognize developmental delays. Do they have any common behaviors across the same?Įven if the personal characteristics of socially successful people are the same across all cultures, they might express these through very different behaviors depending on the culture. If not, we should be wary about any claims of an evolved 'social module' in the brain, claims that people with autism lack such a module, and studies that compare autism prevalence rates across cultures.ī. Norms about appropriate display rules for emotions, body language, etc. Norms about the goals for social interactions

Do socially successful people have any characteristics across cultural and subcultural:īeliefs about the mind, psychology, emotions, etc.

We're trying to understand what goes wrong in autism without understanding, even among neurotypicals, what social success is, what contributes to it, or even whether it exists in any sort of universal way.ġ) Is there anything universally human about social success?Ī. It seems to me that research on social ability and cognition, particularly in autism, has skipped over some crucial questions.

#Basic questions autism social skills how to