4/05/2012

Basic questions we should ask about social skills before theorizing about autism

It seems to me that research on social ability and cognition, particularly in autism, has skipped over some crucial questions.  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.

1) Is there anything universally human about social success?  
a. Do socially successful people have any characteristics across cultural and subcultural:
  • Beliefs about the mind, psychology, emotions, etc.
  • Norms about the goals for social interactions
  • Norms about appropriate display rules for emotions, body language, etc.
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.  
b. Do they have any common behaviors across the same?  
Even 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.  In diagnostic research, this may affect the characteristics by which we recognize developmental delays.  For clinical researchers trying to develop social skills programs, it determines what behaviors to teach.

2) 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?

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.  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.  If this is true, we should be wary both of exaggerated claims about our own "mind reading" capabilities and autistic peoples' social cognition deficits.

3) 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?

If explicit "theory of mind" alone produced social success, most people with Aspergers would be social geniuses, and many NTs would be social dunces.  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).  This may be false, but implies the relationship between theories of mind and social success may be more complex than is often supposed.

4) What perceptual abilities are necessary for social success?  What perceptual abilities are helpful, but not necessary, for social success?

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. 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.  When we read, we are at least can control how fast we read, and can stop and start at will.  Social interactions are likely to be even more complex because we lack even this control.  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?

5) 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?

6) 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?

Many people assume that the more emotional empathy a person has, the more social success they will have, but this assumption should be tested.  My guess is that emotional empathy interacts with performance in a similar way to anxiety: too little and too much are harmful; just the right amount helps.  Too little and you don't care sufficiently about others to treat them well; too much and you are too overwhelmed to think of anything other than making the feeling go away, and may not behave appropriately.  Until we understand this relationship, we should be wary of claims that autistic people lack emotional empathy, or that lack of emotional empathy causes their social failures.

6) For people who are perceived as belonging to an outgroup, or just different, are there any ways to overcome this and achieve social success?  If so, what strategies work?  (Note that the "outgroup" includes not only obvious gender, ethnicity, class and religious differences, but also personality and neurodiversity differences, such as extreme introversion, a developmental disability, extremely low or high IQ).

If an autistic person or an extremely high-IQ person can achieve social success by emulating some neurotypical behaviors, then we should teach them these skills and they should learn them.  If an introvert can only fit in by becoming an extrovert, an autistic person can only fit in by becoming completely neurotypical, and a high-IQ person can only fit in by disguising all traces of their true thought processes, then we should stop blaming their social failures on lack of social skills and instead focus from an early age on placing them with others like themselves so they can find true peers.

7) How aware are we of the processes underlying our own social interactions?
In my own life, the social advice I have received from extremely socially skilled people has been uniformly unhelpful and simplistic (e.g., "just be yourself").  Are socially successful people like other experts, in that they just do what they do without being able to explain how they do it?  To the extent that researchers on social success are socially successful themselves, how much does this distort their research?  How can we work to make the implicit visible?  Ideally, how much social success should a researcher have? ;) (Too little, and they will have trouble grasping the phenomenon well enough to study it; too much, and they will have overly simplistic ideas of how we actually accomplish it).

8) We know that loving, emotionally intelligent parents can foster social success in neurotypicals and that cruel, emotionally abusive parents can stunt it.  Yet, in order to avoid the refrigerator myth, we assume that parenting has no effect on people with autism.  Is this a justified assumption?  How does the family and educational environment interact with an autistic person's genetic predispositions?  What is the best case outcome for an autistic person?

I don't want to unfairly malign an entire field, and I'm always interested in learning about interesting research.  So, do you know of any researchers already trying to address these questions?  If you were a researcher, how would you go about answering them?

15 comments:

  1. Malign away! I think they're all questions to be asked. I don't have any answers, but I'd highly recommend Mindreaders by Ian Apperly. I'm also currently reading "Towards a second person neuroscience", a paper by Schillbach et al., which puts a very different perspective on things.

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    1. Schillbach is next on my list. Thanks so much for your many recommendations.

      I guess it's unfair to expect answers now since some of these questions are complicated and would take many experiments to answer. I'd be happy just to see people asking these sorts of questions. :)

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  2. This was a really interesting post. A lot to process, and I'm not a neuroscientist so some of these questions are way out of my league. But I did want to address #8.

    I've read so much from autistic people raised by neurotypical parents who experienced significant abuse — at least some of which can be attributed to the parents' basic lack of understanding (and acceptance of) the difference between the parents' neurology and the child's neurology.

    I am beginning to understand that my mother is almost certainly on the spectrum, although she would never identify herself that way. I realize now how incredibly lucky I was to be raised by someone who was also an introvert, who also struggled with intense social anxiety and sensory processing issues, who also found most social communication confusing and overwhelming, who would also rather read a book or work on a project alone than go to a party.

    Despite the fact that my mother never thought of any of these issues as an identifiable neurological profile that I shared, her parenting was affected by them in some very specific ways: I was never pushed to "perform" socially in ways that felt impossible for me; I was never punished for failing at things that were beyond my skill set.

    I don't think this was a conscious choice based on an abstract commitment to neurodiversity; it was mostly because she was unable to do these things either, and was probably unable to even recognize that I was failing at them in the first place. She had no expectation that I would enjoy social events, be a good public speaker, succeed at sports, want to go to the prom, etc.

    I had plenty of damage done to my self-esteem by teachers and peers who expected me to be good at (or enjoy) these things, but I'm very grateful that home was always a safe haven. I think autistic kids raised by neurotypical parents are at risk for exponentially more emotional damage because there isn't that shared gut-level understanding of which expectations are reasonable.

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    1. Wow, so glad you pointed this out. I've seen this too but never thought about it much.

      Perhaps extraverted parents could provide a safe haven too if they're willing to be nonconformist?

      BTW, if any of the neuroscience is unclear, please let me know. It's always a challenge to balance the constraints of space/coherent arguments with the need to explain necessary background, and I don't always get it right. :)

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  3. Great post. I've always felt that if anything, some types of those with ASD (Aspergers being my experience) seem to have an over-reaching consciousness of every little social nuance going on. So it seems to me, to be a matter of over-mindedness, rather than mind-blindness.

    It tends to make romantic relationships very hard. Haha...

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    1. What sorts of social nuances would you say they might notice?

      The sense I get is not necessarily that they notice more, but that they think about it more (both on the "what did that behavior mean?" level and the "let me think deeply about what this person's history and motivations might be" level). I don't see NTs doing this very much. Do you think it's about noticing too much or just overthinking?

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  4. Great post. What to teach in social skills is great question.

    7) We call it "social instinct". I think we are only aware of a fraction. Emotion recognition and end point social skills get way too much attention maybe because of verbal thought/cognitive bias, and because they are easiest for us to articulate.

    2) Ickes' empathic accuracy papers show 25% accuracy on average, 30% for married couples, absolute guru max of %60.

    I'm hoping to provide insight on what is happening, letting each deploy/create as they wish. Good results so far just by montessori-sh "revealing" the social value of communicating with the face. Without mentioning any emotion labels, autistic students improved on standardized emotion recognition tests, playground social interactions.
    http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10803-011-1179-z?LI=true

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    1. If social instinct is an important part of functioning socially, what does that imply for what to teach? How can we teach social instinct, or can we at all? Or, should we instead teach ways to compensate for lacking social instinct?

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  5. Thank you so much for bringing this study to my attention! Need to read the paper again more thoroughly, but the program sounds complex enough to help kids generalize to real social situations, yet controlled and predictable enough to learn from. Just wondering...what does Montessori have to do with this? :)

    That's a good point that our verbal bias gets in the way of appreciating social instinct. I bet this is particularly true with cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists--the very folks who study social functioning in autism!

    Thanks for mentioning Ickes' papers--that's exactly what I had in mind! Downloading them for myself right now.

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    1. Your welcome. Sorry for the slow response :-). Ickes' approach - documenting what really happens - is great.

      Loosely, I think of Montessori's approach/goal as constructing an environment to let the student discover something. In broad/simplistic terms, it seems the opposite of a didactic, present the lesson on a platter approach. Naively, I think part of the success/appeal is that the student is more actively engaged. But I wonder if another key difference is the lack of verbal interference, part of my overall idea that as the latest upgrade to our brains, language can impede our non-verbal thinking.

      In FaceSay, rather than try to articulate what an emotion is (a bit of a losing game, since it's another case of attempting to map a colloquial term to scientific understanding) I constructed games that lets the kids discover what they may not be aware of, that there is personal value in attending to someone's face (i.e. it's not just something you do to be polite). I wholeheartedly believe in the value of assessing behavioral changes, but my real goal is a less measurable "aha" insight.

      Yes, scientists would focus on the analytical side. Niedednthal and many others are actively exploring the non-analytical side.

      On your earlier question, yes, I think we can teach some of what came to us by "instinct".

      Perhaps much of our non-verbal thinking seems like an instinct, or may even be something close to a biological instinct, but maybe is not so magical/inaccessible as the lack of words may lead us to assume.

      My rookie approach is to try to triangulate between academic papers, my own internal/personal observations and "field observations" of what people are actually doing. When I am in a project meeting with scientists or an engineering meeting at work, for example, I see lots of facial movements that have little to do with what we would call emotion. When I am engaged in a conversation, I spend zero time decoding emotions, but lots of time "following the face" of the other person.

      I'm still decidedly in the fog, but have a few new ideas that I hope to develop, first for very young kids and then for teens/adults. Should hear about one grant application this Spring.

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    2. Your welcome. Sorry for the slow response :-). Ickes' approach - documenting what really happens - is great.

      Loosely, I think of Montessori's approach/goal as constructing an environment to let the student discover something. In broad/simplistic terms, it seems the opposite of a didactic, present the lesson on a platter approach. Naively, I think part of the success/appeal is that the student is more actively engaged. But I wonder if another key difference is the lack of verbal interference, part of my overall idea that as the latest upgrade to our brains, language can impede our non-verbal thinking.

      In FaceSay, rather than try to articulate what an emotion is (a bit of a losing game, since it's another case of attempting to map a colloquial term to scientific understanding) I constructed games that lets the kids discover what they may not be aware of, that there is personal value in attending to someone's face (i.e. it's not just something you do to be polite). I wholeheartedly believe in the value of assessing behavioral changes, but my real goal is a less measurable "aha" insight.

      Yes, scientists would focus on the analytical side. Niedednthal and many others are actively exploring the non-analytical side.

      On your earlier question, yes, I think we can teach some of what came to us by "instinct".

      Perhaps much of our non-verbal thinking seems like an instinct, or may even be something close to a biological instinct, but maybe is not so magical/inaccessible as the lack of words may lead us to assume.

      My rookie approach is to try to triangulate between academic papers, my own internal/personal observations and "field observations" of what people are actually doing. When I am in a project meeting with scientists or an engineering meeting at work, for example, I see lots of facial movements that have little to do with what we would call emotion. When I am engaged in a conversation, I spend zero time decoding emotions, but lots of time "following the face" of the other person.

      I'm still decidedly in the fog, but have a few new ideas that I hope to develop, first for very young kids and then for teens/adults. Should hear about one grant application this Spring.

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    3. Your welcome. Sorry for the slow response :-). I like Ickes' approach of documenting what is really happening.

      Yes, I do think we can share what we learned by instinct. Intuition, subconscious, instinct, etc. are, I believe, "tags"/approximations for thinking without language. Or, in another vein, it's not magic or inscrutable. Trying to articulate what is inherently without language may be a barrier, however. So, in FaceSay, I created games that I hoped would let the kids experience/discover - loosely analogous to a Montessori (non-didactic) approach - the value of attending to the movements of the Face, particularly around the eyes.

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    4. I hadn't thought about Montessori-style learning by doing working as being about accessing nonverbal parts of the mind. What a cool idea!

      The triangulation you're doing sounds really helpful for figuring out what people are doing in the real world!

      I remember when we first found out about my brother's difficulties my parents worried about how to explain something that they knew, but didn't know how they knew. Maybe FaceSay or something with a similar approach could fill that gap. I'm now following you on Google+; looking forward to hearing the latest about your work.

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  6. Love this blog! On this and other posts you have eloquently articulated ideas that are a tangled mess in my head.
    This book (http://www.speechmark.net/shop/not-just-talking) unpicks the components of non verbal communication and argues that while most people learn this stuff as infants (instinct?) others can learn it later on. A bit like the Facesay link above.

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    1. Thank you so much, and sorry for the late reply! I'll definitely have to check out the book. I'm especially interested to see how he thinks nonverbal communication works and what the components are. :)

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