Making Small Talk
By: Elizabeth Zeppernick, M.Ed., BCBA, LBA
If friendships are built on shared interests, then what happens if an individual struggles to identify the interests of others in relation to their own? Identifying a shared interest, volleying back and forth in conversation about that interest and detecting cues as to when to stop conversing on a topic are social skills a neurotypical person may take for granted.
One distinctive feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a deficit in social communication and interaction. Children and adults with social skill deficits can experience isolation, depressive symptoms (Hedley and Young, 2006), and a lack of strong friendships and steady employment (Howlin et al. 2004). There is a correlation between social status and a robust or, conversely weak social skill repertoire (Hazen and Black, 1989). Put bluntly, how liked or disliked you are is dependent upon your ability to engage in appropriate communication by speaking on a topic of shared interest, initiate novel topics during a lull in conversation and know which topics to avoid based on someone else's lack of interest. To avoid investing time and energy into a partnership with no shared interest, it is equally important to know when to stop a conversation and seek another conversation partner. With this in mind, it becomes crucial for educators to explicitly teach conversation skills to promote meaningful relationships.
Researchers Hood et al. (2022) conducted a study with the goal of teaching individuals with autism to gauge interest on a topic and shift or end the conversation based on signs of disinterest. Their published study is titled, The beginning of a friendship: Teaching individuals with autism to identify shared interests.
This study had three participants - a 10-year-old male with ASD, ADHD, and Tourette’s, a 9-year-old male with ASD and a 16-year-old female with ASD. All three participants were referred for services based on their conversation deficits. These participants were seen at a clinic one to two times per week for the duration of one to two hours. Each of the training sessions were 20 minutes in duration. With the exception of one peer for the teenage participant, adults served as conversation partners.
Using a Behavioral Skills Training (BST) model, trainers followed these four steps:
Instruction: Participants were given the rationale for the importance of the target conversational skill and an explanation of the target response.
Model: The trainer modeled both examples and non-examples of the target skill with another adult. They modeled following initiated conversations, initiating one’s own topic, and shifting the conversation.
Rehearsal: The participant practiced the target skill with the trainer in a 10-trial session.
Feedback: During the practice, the trainer gave descriptive praise and feedback for correct responses and used a textual and visual prompt for incorrect responses. The textual prompt was a card that said “Make a statement or ask a question about this topic” or “Try another topic.”
Conversation topics were not scripted but based on the participant and conversation partner's true interests. Given the results of a pre-test which showed that all three participants found attention reinforcing, topics of shared interest were differentially reinforced with high quality attention consisting of passionate responses in a higher rate and rhythm of voice, gestures, smiling, laughing and leaning into the speaker.
Following BST, all three participants improved their ability to engage in a sustained shared interest conversation. This took 3,10 and 4 sessions of teaching respectively. They were able to change a topic based on signs of their partners waning interest. This took 2, 3 and 13 teaching sessions respectively. Participants were also able to discriminate cues of their conversation partner’s disinterest to end a conversation. This took 3, 5 and 3 sessions respectively.
Based on a post-training rating scale, both participants and the parents of the participants reported high levels of satisfaction with the training and outcome.
Using BST, researchers taught the foundational conversation skills to identify shared interests, maintain conversations based on those interests, shift topics based on signs of disinterest and end a conversation based on sustained signs of disinterest. Using this model, the subtlety of social cues was effectively trained. For individuals with deficits in conversational social skills, this finding can lead to mutually reinforcing and meaningful relationships.
Sources:
Hazen, N., & Black, B. (1989). Preschool peer communication skills: The role of social status and interaction context. Child Development, 60(4), 867-876. https://doi.org/10.2307/1131028
Hedley, D., & Young, R. (2006). Social comparison processes and depressive symptoms in children and adolescents with Asperger syndrome. Autism, 10(2), 139-153. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361306062020
Hood, S.A., Gopez, J.M., Fallon, M.J., Byczynski, F.A. Aquino, S.C. and Monroy, S. (2022), The beginning of a friendship: Teaching individuals with autism to identify shared interests. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 55: 1030-1058. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaba.951
Howlin, P., Goode, S., Hutton, J., &Rutter, M. (2004). Adult outcome for children with autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 45(2), 219-229. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2004.00215.x
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