Social cognition is our ability to perceive other people and how we learn about the world around us. It requires us to perceive, remember, think about and pay attention to other people around us. It affects the way in which we store information about people and how we interact with them.
Social cognition develops from birth and we continue to develop our skills in this area throughout life. Social cognition is not something that we are explicitly taught but rather something that we absorb through watching how our interactions affect those around us and therefore the way that people respond to us.
Just like with general cognitive and academic ability, we all have different levels of social cognitive ability. Some disorders impact social cognition ability. The most noticeable is Autism, but others include dementia, depression, brain injury, personality disorders, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
With the right support and guidance we can help our children who don't pick up social cognition intuitively and teach them these skills. It is important to remember that our children with Autism may have intuitive skills in other areas that we need to learn cognitively (e.g. Maths or music).
To have good social thinking skills as children we need to move from the egocentric view of the world and begin to think about how other people might see things. We need to develop theory of mind (the idea that other people have thoughts and knowledge that may be different from our own) and to use this to think about how our choices when interacting with others will affect how people respond to us and consequently affect our outcomes. We then need to be able to modify our interactions to reflect this.
Social thinking was developed by Michelle Garcia Winner following work with children who were cognitively able to manage life effectively in all aspects but lacked social cognition skills. With her collaborators (most notable Pamela Crooke) Michelle Garcia Winner has developed a range of resources for teaching social cognition skills to a wide range of ages.
Traditional social skills groups and teaching have taught about the rules for social skills, but social thinking is one of the few resources available that teaches how we work out what to do in social situations, not just what to do. This is a vital skill to enable the children that we work with to become competent social thinkers in adult life. For example if we teach children that they should stand an arms length away from a stranger, what happens when they are on a crowded bus or waiting in a busy doctors waiting room? The rule cannot be maintained which adds to anxiety around the situation.
Another example is how we greet our friends (do we hug them? do we kiss them on one cheek or both cheeks or not at all? do we shake hands? slap them on the back? exchange friendly insults? just say hi?) The answer is that for most of us it varies from friend to friend, but we don't discuss or agree this with our friends, it just happens organically. So to be affective social thinkers, our children need to learn how we tell and to develop those tools for themselves for example, start small and work up, remember what response you got last time, look at and mimic the social behaviours of others in the environment, watch how people respond to you and modify your interactions accordingly etc.
Giving our young people the skills they need to make social decisions for themselves allows them to have more control of their social success while respecting their individuality and motivations. It does not impose rules that a neurotypical world insists they follow.
Social Thinking provides training courses both on line and in person as well as a number of free resources, articles and webinars. It is worth looking on their website or following them on social media to take advantage of this.
Written by Sarah Lord, TCT's Speech and Language Therapy Team Lead.
At TCT, we provide a Social Communication Specialist service to support children in overcoming barriers to learning and social interaction. You can download a brochure with full details of the service below.
Comments