1) Singing, dancing, reading, talking about something enjoyable that you've read, with small groups of people you trust.
2) Reading, writing (historically, writing poetry or paper journal entries; I'm not sure that blogging fulfills the same need), drawing (not that I do much of this either these days). Crafts in general, making things, whether it's bread by hand or a skirt on a sewing machine. Clay was really good when I was in high school. Small achievable boring tasks are useful, like laundry, dishes, mending, although if any of these gets huge enough to be overwhelming, or there's visible lack of support from other people, it can be counterproductive. Cardiovascular exercise also helps me a lot, both for the legal high, and for the relaxed feeling of stopping at the end.
3) Well, I don't have an office, and I haven't necessarily solved this problem, so this might not be helpful. It is possible that my recent unit origami binge at work counts, but it's a little weird and distraction, and I worry that it makes it obvious how much free time I have. Doing things out by hand sometimes helps me - writing out a test by hand and making it pretty, writing up an origami design for a kid, that kind of thing. And in an educational context, one-on-one tutoring is probably the most relaxing thing I do, since I can get to know kids as individuals, there's no classroom management headache, and it's kind of like laundry and dishes - small, achievable task, where I know I can actually get the kid to understand the ideas and accomplish stuff, good for self-esteem.
4) What techniques do you use to make yourself aware of how your actions affect other people? Are these things you instinctively know how to do/think to do, or was this a process you had to work hard at learning? I can't think of a lot of techniques in between the basic empathy that goes on normally (can't turn it off, sometimes it gets in the way, e.g. when a kid gives a totally lame-yet-tragic excuse for why they didn't get their homework done), and being stressed enough about something to have to consult a third party. If I'm not sure what decision to make, how something will affect other people, or I've done something and gotten a totally unexpected reaction, I'll ask third parties whom I trust for their take on it. Generally people I see as having either better, or just different social skills, who I trust to actually tell me if I'm doing something seriously wrong and not just be generically supportive.
To the extent that I have skills in this dimension, they're not things I had to work hard at learning. Mostly - I remember some initially very stressful conversations with Noda or Greg or people in Russia where they gave me feedback (e.g. about voice volume, which is a problem I know I have, and one that hanging out with SWIL and middle-schoolers only makes worse; possibly also about more subtle social things) and I took it very hard. I've tried to be better about this, but it's sometimes hard; I'm sure people would be more forthcoming about feedback if I accepted it more gracefully.
5) Probably about a 5. Not exceptional, not all that impaired. Trying to control for the psychological phenomenon where everyone thinks they're above average.
I can generally tell when people are upset. Although not always - as a kid, I always read anger into my mom's voice and body language when she said they weren't there. In hindsight, this might be her being anxious and tense when she wasn't actually upset, but at the time my defensive reactions to it really aggravated our fights.
I'm very (perhaps over-) sensitive to people's tones of voice, and pretty sensitive to mood/body language. Often when people's nonverbal cues are trying to explicitly and consciously communicate something, I have no idea what they're trying to say.
I'm much better about picking things up in person than over the phone or email, and much better at reading close friends and family (with the proviso above about my mom) than random people.
I'm also not sure how good I am at actually signaling things like mood through nonverbal cues. I don't know if people are bad at reading me, people are bad at reading people, or I'm bad at cueing.
6) Social cue issues - I'd guess difficulties in "reading between the lines", knowing when it's appropriate to begin or end a conversation, knowing when it's necessary to leave someone alone and when it's not, reading someone's mood and knowing the appropriate ways to handle that mood, maybe being able to pick up cues about levels of intimacy/formality in a conversation. The examples that come to mind as being problems are often guys not being aware that they were making girls uncomfortable, or people in college not picking up that I was tired and wanted them to go away now, even though I was not only clearly exhausted, but in bed and rapidly falling asleep. (Clearly the latter are especially not you.) Or misreading a type of situation - you are in this kind of situation, this kind of place, with these kinds of people, so you should speak at this volume, use this type of language, move like this. For values of place like school, museum, airport, train station, city street, restaurant you might want to return to, movie theater, dorm room, parents' house, etc...
2) Reading, writing (historically, writing poetry or paper journal entries; I'm not sure that blogging fulfills the same need), drawing (not that I do much of this either these days). Crafts in general, making things, whether it's bread by hand or a skirt on a sewing machine. Clay was really good when I was in high school. Small achievable boring tasks are useful, like laundry, dishes, mending, although if any of these gets huge enough to be overwhelming, or there's visible lack of support from other people, it can be counterproductive. Cardiovascular exercise also helps me a lot, both for the legal high, and for the relaxed feeling of stopping at the end.
3) Well, I don't have an office, and I haven't necessarily solved this problem, so this might not be helpful. It is possible that my recent unit origami binge at work counts, but it's a little weird and distraction, and I worry that it makes it obvious how much free time I have. Doing things out by hand sometimes helps me - writing out a test by hand and making it pretty, writing up an origami design for a kid, that kind of thing. And in an educational context, one-on-one tutoring is probably the most relaxing thing I do, since I can get to know kids as individuals, there's no classroom management headache, and it's kind of like laundry and dishes - small, achievable task, where I know I can actually get the kid to understand the ideas and accomplish stuff, good for self-esteem.
4) What techniques do you use to make yourself aware of how your actions affect other people? Are these things you instinctively know how to do/think to do, or was this a process you had to work hard at learning?
I can't think of a lot of techniques in between the basic empathy that goes on normally (can't turn it off, sometimes it gets in the way, e.g. when a kid gives a totally lame-yet-tragic excuse for why they didn't get their homework done), and being stressed enough about something to have to consult a third party. If I'm not sure what decision to make, how something will affect other people, or I've done something and gotten a totally unexpected reaction, I'll ask third parties whom I trust for their take on it. Generally people I see as having either better, or just different social skills, who I trust to actually tell me if I'm doing something seriously wrong and not just be generically supportive.
To the extent that I have skills in this dimension, they're not things I had to work hard at learning. Mostly - I remember some initially very stressful conversations with Noda or Greg or people in Russia where they gave me feedback (e.g. about voice volume, which is a problem I know I have, and one that hanging out with SWIL and middle-schoolers only makes worse; possibly also about more subtle social things) and I took it very hard. I've tried to be better about this, but it's sometimes hard; I'm sure people would be more forthcoming about feedback if I accepted it more gracefully.
5) Probably about a 5. Not exceptional, not all that impaired. Trying to control for the psychological phenomenon where everyone thinks they're above average.
I can generally tell when people are upset. Although not always - as a kid, I always read anger into my mom's voice and body language when she said they weren't there. In hindsight, this might be her being anxious and tense when she wasn't actually upset, but at the time my defensive reactions to it really aggravated our fights.
I'm very (perhaps over-) sensitive to people's tones of voice, and pretty sensitive to mood/body language. Often when people's nonverbal cues are trying to explicitly and consciously communicate something, I have no idea what they're trying to say.
I'm much better about picking things up in person than over the phone or email, and much better at reading close friends and family (with the proviso above about my mom) than random people.
I'm also not sure how good I am at actually signaling things like mood through nonverbal cues. I don't know if people are bad at reading me, people are bad at reading people, or I'm bad at cueing.
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