Types of Social Skills

After looking at the importance of social skills, I wanted to look at the types of social skills there are. I came across this website, https://www.understood.org/en/friends-feelings/common-challenges/picking-up-on-social-cues/4-types-of-social-cues which had some of the main types of social cues....

Facial Expressions - We use facial expressions to express how we are feeling at a certain particular time like smiling when we are happy and it's probably the first thing we see when we talk to someone so it's important to have the social skills to understand facial expressions. It's hard to hid our emotions through facial expressions because we may do something without realizing it like sometimes we may raise an eyebrow without knowing.

Body Language - We may use our body to express our emotions as an alternative way to facial expressions.

Voice Pitch and Tone - We may use our tone of voice to get a point across. Changing the voice pitch or tone of our voices could have an impact on how we say things and could change the meaning of what is being said.

Personal Space - Invading someone's personal space could be an indicate that we like them because we intend to get closer to someone if we like them but knowing how close we can invade the personal space or for how long is up to how good social skills are because we usually get a feeling from the person if they want us to move away.

I came across another website,   https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/growing-friendships/201108/what-are-social-skills which looks at the main processes of social skills that human beings have to use to interact and understand each other.

The main processes are....

- Seeing - seeing can be used in humans trying to notice and understand the other person's behaviour by seeing what is happening, for example, seeing their body language. It means understanding and noticing the context of the conversation, for example, kids who struggle with social skills might act silly in a situation where other people might be serious but they don't notice the seriousness around them because they can't read the body language or facial expression.

- Thinking - meaning, a person trying to interpret the other person's behaviour and thinking why they are doing what they are doing like are they being deliberate or accidental, that kind of stuff.

People with poor social skills could struggle to interpret other people's intentions, while having good social skills, a person could predict the other person's response and reply in effective ways.

- Doing - meaning, interacting with people in positive ways, for example, a person might want to join a conversation but lack the social skills to do so and they just feel anxious and avoid it, while others might say inappropriate comments without thinking about it.