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How Studying Body Language Changed the Way I Socialize

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Re: How Studying Body Language Changed the Way I Socialize

#81

Post by psweber »

dkarl wrote: post #74

When I notice a conversation veering into an unpleasant territory, I perk up, do the empathy-thing, and I naturally bring it back to something more pleasant. I'm not comfortable with this as a general strategy stemming from a universal mantra. Learning this as an adult is impressive and probably exceptional, but it's a phenomenon we're all familiar with. We all know people who behave like this reflexively and have do…

> I would argue that in this case we are seeing a misguided (and probably temporary) "zeal of the convert"

While many of your points are valid, I don’t see the author as a misguided person who has made a temporary, superficial discovery about interpersonal relationships. Having gone through a lot of this myself, I see the author as taking a huge first step towards the growth of his emotional intelligence. He implies that he has a history of speaking his mind (with a lack of tact). Now he is learning to emphathize and have pleasant relationships. The next step is learning to balance those things. Speak your mind when doing so is important, and consider the impact of your words while doing so. Sometimes telling someone a hard truth is the true kindness. As the author points out, the way you deliver those messages determines whether they are helpful or just hurtful.

Re: How Studying Body Language Changed the Way I Socialize

#82

Post by rcthompson »

fatboy wrote: post #45
rcthompson wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least for some subset of them, "social intelligence" is little more than analytic intelligence applied to something that has a very low signal-to-noise ratio. Yep, that's exactly what it feels like to me. I recently got diagnosed with Asperger's. I find it impossible to do "social intelligence" in real time during a conversation. The frustrating part is that the signal is obviously there, since other people pick…

Do you find it possible to identify the signals by analysing interactions after the fact, not in real time?

Sometimes I realize hours or days later that I missed something obvious and important, but of course I cannot do this for every social interaction because I don't have time. Also, thinking about it leaves me mentally exhausted in the same way that organic chemistry and advanced mathematics (two subjects I find easy) do for neurotypicals. But my after-the-fact realizations are contingent upon my noticing and remembering specific details that indicate emotion, which is totally hit-or-miss.

Re: How Studying Body Language Changed the Way I Socialize

#83

Post by gcr »

graeme wrote: post #49
rcthompson wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least for some subset of them, "social intelligence" is little more than analytic intelligence applied to something that has a very low signal-to-noise ratio. Yep, that's exactly what it feels like to me. I recently got diagnosed with Asperger's. I find it impossible to do "social intelligence" in real time during a conversation. The frustrating part is that the signal is obviously there, since other people pick…

Paul Ekman has extensively documented micro expressions, which are trace views of the signal. Studying them will teach you the normal, longer expressions too, that's how I learned. How exactly does asperger's work? For me the learning process went: Learn that crinkles under the eye mean smile is real --> observe it quite a bit --> learn to see it naturally and intuitively That doesn't feel any different from any norm…

I have both Asperger's and vision impairment. I can't discern microexpressions; I don't see crinkles under eyes or dimples on cheeks. What other ways are there?

Re: How Studying Body Language Changed the Way I Socialize

#84

Post by dkarl »

psweber wrote: post #81
dkarl wrote: post #74

When I notice a conversation veering into an unpleasant territory, I perk up, do the empathy-thing, and I naturally bring it back to something more pleasant. I'm not comfortable with this as a general strategy stemming from a universal mantra. Learning this as an adult is impressive and probably exceptional, but it's a phenomenon we're all familiar with. We all know people who behave like this reflexively and have do…

> I would argue that in this case we are seeing a misguided (and probably temporary) "zeal of the convert" While many of your points are valid, I don’t see the author as a misguided person who has made a temporary, superficial discovery about interpersonal relationships. Having gone through a lot of this myself, I see the author as taking a huge first step towards the growth of his emotional intelligence. He implies…

Learning the technique for yourself is one thing. Applying it universally is another, and applying it to other people is yet another. He shouldn't assume that if a conversation takes a negative twist that somebody has screwed up and the empathetic thing to do is to put it back on a positive track. For example, I was waiting to cross the street the other day, and a woman came running past me and ran across the street against the light so she could catch a bus that was about to pull away. A black kid standing next to me said, "If I did that, that cop over there would have pulled over to get me." It was an unpleasant and awkward thing for me to contemplate, and probably not the right thing to say if the kid wanted to put me at ease or be the most charming possible company, but all he wanted was a little microdose of empathy from a stranger. (In retrospect, I'm impressed he was optimistic enough to expect it. I hope I delivered.) Trying to put that conversation back on a pleasant track would not have showed much empathy; in fact, it probably would have made him feel more alone instead of less alone.

I don't mean to send a harsh personal judgment about the author, by the way, only his message. The zeal of the convert is something that happens naturally to everyone when they discover something that opens up new possibilities for them, whether it's a social technique or a programming language.

Re: How Studying Body Language Changed the Way I Socialize

#85

Post by kijin »

graeme wrote: post #78
kijin wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> learn to see it naturally and intuitively What exactly does it mean for something to become natural and intuitive? It's not unimaginable for an Aspie to learn to observe all sorts of behavioral hints -- BBC's recent incarnation of Sherlock Holmes does this exceptionally well -- but does he actually reach the decision that "This person is telling the truth" by the same process that a "normal" person does? In my expe…

Thanks for the explanation. Focus would definitely get in the way, since interpreting body language requires seeing many things at once. I'll explain natural and intuitive by an example. In grade 8, I learned to juggle. Not well, but good enough. The process involved clumsily learning several motions and putting them together. Now I can still juggle, despite years of not doing it. The skill, to the level that I train…

Aspies are often noticeably clumsy when it comes to bodily movements. When they play sports, they use more analytical thinking than physical instinct. I often played badminton with my brother when I was young. Every time, I found myself analyzing the trajectory of the shuttlecock to decide where to put my racket. By the time I'm done, it's often too late to move my body into the right position. Ditto for pretty much every other sport I've tried. Beside social ineptitude, lack of skill in sports is a common reason why Aspies feel alienated in school.

But there is something called muscle memory, which allows even Aspies to do certain highly repetitive physical tasks without having to think too much. Typing and walking seem to fall into this category, though if there's nothing else to occupy my mind, it's not impossible for me to start being analytical about every step of a walk. I don't know where juggling fits in the spectrum, because I've never tried it, but the spectrum exists. Some types of bodily movements just seem to require some mysterious skill that can't be emulated with fast-but-single-threaded analytical reasoning.

Cooking is a piece of cake. You just apply a function to some ingredients, take the output, and feed it into the next function. Muscle memory takes care of stir(), and since it doesn't involve much thinking, I can afford to insert interrupts here and there to handle other events.

Re: How Studying Body Language Changed the Way I Socialize

#86

Post by dkarl »

chunky1994 wrote: post #77
dkarl wrote: post #74

When I notice a conversation veering into an unpleasant territory, I perk up, do the empathy-thing, and I naturally bring it back to something more pleasant. I'm not comfortable with this as a general strategy stemming from a universal mantra. Learning this as an adult is impressive and probably exceptional, but it's a phenomenon we're all familiar with. We all know people who behave like this reflexively and have do…

> "Perking up" when another person's uncomfortable emotions come to the fore and steering the conversation away teaches them that their problems are their own, and that their full selves are excluded while a partial self (with unpleasantness filtered out) is welcome. I suspect that the author meant this in non-intimate situations, however I agree with your general trend of reasoning. These types of people are comfort…

People who like to dodge awkward conversations, and who are skilled at it, will dodge the awkward conversations you really want to have with them. In the case of romantic relationships, they'll dodge the conversations you desperately NEED to have with them, and you'll get stuck in a hopeless rut where they repeatedly make you feel like a problem is being addressed when it really isn't. You might not blame them for it right away, but believe me, the results are unsatisfying.

On a not entirely unrelated note, people will also use empathy to respond to requests for things. You can spend years with someone before you learn that expressing empathy is their way of avoiding saying "no." (You'll figure this out much faster if it's a working relationship instead of a romantic one.)

Empathy can be a powerful, powerful force, and it can act on either party.

Re: How Studying Body Language Changed the Way I Socialize

#87

Post by corporalagumbo »

erichocean wrote: post #24
kijin wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It really is a learnable skill! ... We've just forgotten the habit as a society of teaching it to our children. I think that's a hasty generalization. Some people are merely introverted, and can improve their social intelligence through everyday practice. Others, however, actually have a neurological condition (i.e. Asperger's Syndrome, which the article mentions). At least for some subset of them, "social intellig…

I do find it interesting that we ask Aspies to become more empathetic, but we don't ask neurotipicals to become a little less hung up on social niceties. Obviously, neurotypicals get the benefit of the doubt for "how people should be", since there are so many more of them. But we don't ask gays to be straight, despite not being "normal", numerically, so why should we ask Aspies to be more empathetic? Why assume an As…

Wikipedia describes Asperger's as a "pervasive developmental disorder", characterised by "significant difficulties in social interaction, alongside restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests" and also often "physical clumsiness and atypical use of language." This description, along with my impression of how people with the condition function in life, brings to my mind an image of people who are socially-blind, unable to avoid constantly tripping, stumbling and smashing into the obstacles of social terrain around them.

While I support the move to view Asperger's more as a different way of being human rather than a defect per se, this does not to me sound like the making of a new master race. If Zynga was the result of a Asperger's conspiracy to hijack the frivolous satisfaction pathways of "neurotypicals" and so take over the world, I might think differently. But it's not. People with Asperger's don't seem to be interested in conquering the neurotypical world, they seem to be happiest staying at home playing with computers and avoiding other people.

Basically, my impression of Asperger's sufferers is that they lack the social insight and intuition to succeed in the real world. They do okay in carefully-constructed bubbles with interesting non-human toys and machines to play with. But they can't cope with normal human beings.

Additionally, your characterisation of normal human beings as too dumb and clueless to resist mindless games is... rather crude I think. You sound bitter.

Re: How Studying Body Language Changed the Way I Socialize

#88

Post by psweber »

dkarl wrote: post #84
psweber wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would argue that in this case we are seeing a misguided (and probably temporary) "zeal of the convert" While many of your points are valid, I don’t see the author as a misguided person who has made a temporary, superficial discovery about interpersonal relationships. Having gone through a lot of this myself, I see the author as taking a huge first step towards the growth of his emotional intelligence. He implies…

Learning the technique for yourself is one thing. Applying it universally is another, and applying it to other people is yet another. He shouldn't assume that if a conversation takes a negative twist that somebody has screwed up and the empathetic thing to do is to put it back on a positive track. For example, I was waiting to cross the street the other day, and a woman came running past me and ran across the street…

Awesome practical example. Yer right. Life is definitely more nuanced, and acting "pleasant" 100% of the time doesn't make sense.

Re: How Studying Body Language Changed the Way I Socialize

#89

Post by thesz »

graeme wrote: post #80
thesz wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Paul Ekman... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17221309 "M. O'Sullivan and P. Ekman (2004) claim to have discovered 29 wizards of deception detection. The present commentary offers a statistical critique of the evidence for this claim. Analyses reveal that chance can explain results that the authors attribute to wizardry..."

I wasn't talking about the "wizard" claims. Ekman literally wrote the book of facial expression classification: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_Action_Coding_System#s... You could argue that the system is bunk, of course, but that's a different argument from te wizardry claims.

First I read about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiognomy in the book from from 190x. Yes, the beginning of the twentieth century. They stimulated facial muscles with electricity and it allowed them to create emotions' expressions and classify them. So Ekman isn't even first to do that.

I see the FACS as a modern extension of the physiognomy. With all the scientific foundation of the latter.

Re: How Studying Body Language Changed the Way I Socialize

#90

Post by the_cat_kittles »

corporalagumbo wrote: post #43
the_cat_kittles wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the thoughtful words. Based on my text alone, I can see how these would apply. I think I know all these things intellectually. I probably put most of them into practice. I wonder if a big part of the problem is I work from home, and I work all the time. Or is that symptom? You deserve serious kudos for the list, regardless.

Perhaps if work is something you find so absorbing and such an important part of your life, any natural social solution would develop from your work interest. I don't know what you do, but are there any ways you could meet up with people doing similar stuff or with similar interests locally? Can you do any of your work away from home, in a more social environment (Starbucks e.g.)? Maybe there's a local cafe you could…

Im a developer at a small startup, I work from home, in Portland, OR.
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