Reading Social Cues

May 28, 2010 by Lisa Freeman
Posted in•Social Thinking

I got an email from a colleague last week. The tone of the email seemed quite negative to me and I became annoyed as I read it.

My reply reflected my emotion and therefore wasn’t pleasant.  I was about to hit ‘send’ when it occurred to me that I wasn’t really sure why my colleague had such an attitude in her email. The situation that she was referring to shouldn’t have elicited the kind of reaction that I was reading into the email.

I thought about the differences between ‘live conversations’ and ‘email conversations’. On-line there are no social cues to read. You can’t see the person’s facial expression or body language. You don’t hear the tone or volume of the voice. Was my colleague upset by the situation or was she being sarcastic? I had no way to tell because I couldn’t see or hear her saying the words.

This is what it must be like for those individuals who can’t read or understand the social cues of body language, facial expression and vocal tone.  They have to guess the intent of the words that they hear just as I was guessing the intent of the email.

However, unlike those individuals with social/pragmatic deficits I understood that I might be misinterpreting what she wrote and knew I could call her to find out what was going on.

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