Postcards From My Mind: Perspectives of Asperger's Syndrome

Stages of Having a Conversation

When I first began analyzing social interactions I found that there were two logic-based formulas that when used simultaneously produced natural conversations. The first one is the four stages of a conversation:

1. Initiating conversation: Does the person know how to begin a conversation with familiar and non-familiar people?
   
   
2. Monitoring body language and environmental cues: When people speak they use a combination of spoken language and body language to convey meaning. Does the person know what various nonverbal cues mean? Can the person monitor (both give and interpret) nonverbal signals? Is the person able to infer the full range of mental states of the other person might be feeling and apply a possible reason why?
   
   
3. Maintaining conversations: does the person know how to change their body language, tone of voice, and line of questions/comments in response to the person’s message? Is the person able to pick out the most probably and relevant possibility from the generated list of what the other person is possibly feeling/thinking? Does the person have an adequate ability to use questions and comments?
   
   
4. Disengaging from conversation: Does a person know when to end a conversation and can they do it gracefully?

Under stage three, maintaining conversations, comes the second rule-based logic for conversations, which is the following formula: Someone initiates a conversation and making a relevant comment or asking a relevant question maintains conversation. From this initial relevant comment or relevant question, the conversation continues by either starting from the first step (again initiating a new conversation) or continuing with the second step – asking another relevant question or making another relevant comment. It is important to use a 50/50 ratio between asking questions and making comments, otherwise the conversations sound odd.

Understanding these four stages and following the formula of someone initiates the conversation and the listener’s option is to (a) make a relevant comment, or (b) ask a relevant question.

I had read several books on teaching social skills, but they were all very rote. Anyone can learn rote social skills, but in order to teach social conversations that can be spontaneously generalized, one must be able to read nonverbal cues. When people communicate they use verbal skills and non-verbal skills. These nonverbal skills can be a glance, a raise of the eyebrow expressing interest or suspicion, tone of voice, facial expression, body language, and many more. Teaching nonverbal cues is one of the foundations of Bateson Therapy, the therapy I designed based upon my own experiences.
(See http://stopthatbehavior.com/home-based.html#bateson for more information)

One of the things that always amazes me is when two people are talking and they just seem to know what to say. They just seem to know what each other is feeling and thinking. This still blows my mind. In my head, I have a computer program that I designed which gets me through all interactions. For about 20 years I’ve played with computers and use this as an analogy to explain my brain (not realizing until recently how metaphoric this analogy is). For example, say I met John for the first time. I visually map out John’s face on a grid. This grid has various numerical points.

Then I double click my brain file that stores information about books and open various files on body language/posture. I look for pictures on facial expressions. Then I scale down the drawings in the book to fit over John’s face. Whichever facial expression John is making, I can coordinate the points (+/- 2 Standard Deviations) and translate that information into the written text of the book and come up with an emotion. Often this leaves me with an accurate assessment of the emotion but not the “why” of the emotion (which can be a problem – I will discuss this later in the Theory of Mind section). All of this happens within a few seconds, but it doesn’t feel natural.

By memorizing all different aspects of body language and tone of voice I have a method to comprehend the world around me. In the August 2002 issue of the New Yorker Magazine there was an article that I found remarkable. A person has actually mapped out all of the facial expressions a person could have and what they mean. In essence, I’ve been doing this for years and it’s a very effective method of understanding emotions.

The pages that follow give techniques for teaching nonverbal cues.

 

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