#social ability

[youthvoices-blog1]

Is Technology Making us Less Intelligent?

New technology comes out every day, and whenever it does everyone in America scrambles to get it.  We lavish in the light of the new-found device, and then shortly thereafter it becomes a part of everyday life and we lose our fascination with it.  Many claim that all of this new technology is making us smarter and has become a catalyst for our evolution.  However, I am of the opinion that the…

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[govie28]

The globe is occupied with millions of smartphone users. Popular sellers such as Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and AT & T service innumerable clients throughout the world. Smartphone usage is so prevalent that you can hardly look anywhere without seeing someone manipulating one or even two of these gadgets. Chances are that you have one as well.

However, there are as many pros and cons which need to…

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[neurodiversitysci]

Real Social Skills Nails It Again

RealSocialSkills ‏@rsocialskills 2h

#socialskills is often very close to being a slur meaning that however disabled people interact is always wrong

RealSocialSkills ‏@rsocialskills 2h

In my approach to #socialskills, I don't assume that autistic folks are wrong and NT folks are right. I think we all have what to learn.

RealSocialSkills ‏@rsocialskills 2h

There are a number of #socialskills related to treating disabled folks right that no one expects nondisabled people to learn.

RealSocialSkills ‏@rsocialskills 2h

No one ever gets sent to a #socialskills class for not understanding or ignoring #autistic people's body language or other communication

RealSocialSkills ‏@rsocialskills 2h

No one ever gets sent to #socialskills training for being incompetent at modifying plans to include people with disabilities.

RealSocialSkills ‏@rsocialskills 2h

No one ever gets sent to #socialskills classes for staring at the disabled kids or calling them the r-word.

Real Social Skills points out that currently, "social skills training" means teaching disabled people how to act like nondisabled people.  But good social skills really means the ability to interact positively with anyone, disabled or not.  Nondisabled people often need at least as much training to interact with disabled people as disabled people need to interact with them, but few people are talking about this.

[wildcat2030]

The same brain regions that perform cognitive tasks may also provide social intelligence, according to a new study Emotional smarts and general intelligence may be more closely linked than previously thought, new research suggests.

In a group of Vietnam veterans, IQ test results and emotional intelligence, or the ability to perceive, understand and deal with emotion in oneself or in others, were linked. And in brain scans, the same regions of the brain seemed to perform both emotional and cognitive tasks, the study found. The findings were published in the journal Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience.

"Intelligence, to a large extent, does depend on basic cognitive abilities, like attention and perception and memory and language," said study coauthor Aron Barbey, a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois, in a statement. "But it also depends on interacting with other people. We're fundamentally social beings and our understanding not only involves basic cognitive abilities but also involves productively applying those abilities to social situations so that we can navigate the social world and understand others."

[neurodiversitysci]

A casual world overemphasizes the face. Memory likes to recall the whole body. It is not our parents' faces that come back to us, but their bodies, in the accustomed chairs, eating, sewing, smoking, doing all the familiar things. We remember each as a body in action.

-Mabel E. Todd, The Thinking Body

[neurodiversitysci]

From my longform, more academic blog over at Blogspot.

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.

If you were a researcher, what questions would you ask?

[neurodiversitysci]

The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred.

-George Bernard Shaw

[neurodiversitysci]

I suspect that nobody understands themselves even half as much as some of us Aspies understand ourselves. Why? Because some of the “others” are not involved in an endless process of trying to figure out how and why there is so much “wrong” about their psyches.

-Spunkykitty on the Autism and Empathy blog http://www.autismandempathy.com/?p=982

Note: I suspect this goes for other learning and developmental disabilities, particularly when the person wasn't diagnosed until very late, and neither he nor others knew why he was different.