The NonVerbal vs. the Unsaid

Post Reply New Topic

b9, in a movie I saw, the wife thinks her husband has another woman. She doesn't tell him her suspicions (UNSAID), she goes and gets herself a lover. Her husband finds out she has a lover and doesn't say anything to her (UNSAID). Instead, he starts looking frantically for some woman to have an affair with, as revenge. When husband and wife are together at home after work, they laugh, smile, show interest in each other's day by their body posture and eye expression, etc. etc. (NONVERBAL).

They're 2 totally different things, with no overlap between them.

yes they are "unsaid", but they are not expressions of non verbal communication either, so they does not count as "non verbal communication".

things that you refer to as "unsaid" are just examples of privations of information that you feel deserved to know.
if someone does not tell you something deliberately, then how can you get any grasp on what they did not tell you?

i was talking about misunderstanding forms of communication. i was not talking about misunderstanding "non communication".

"non communication" deserves no apology for anyone's lack lack of understanding.

i am so tired and i have worked hard to day and my statement needs not to be responded to.

No one talked about deserving or apologies. And the Unsaid isn't a form of communication. Yet, NTs can and do grasp the unsaid in many instances, which Aspies can't and don't.

The wife got an intuitive feeling that something wasn't right. The husband got the same intuitive feeling. You and I never did, so we never discovered that there was something wrong until it exploded in our faces.

my face is never looking in the direction of an where an explosion happens.

i can not understand the notion of "intuition". it is similar to superstition and magical thinking. it is not calculable from environmental data..
that is scary to me. i would not like to be so out of control that i am drawn out of my sensibility by concerns about "inferred" meanings that plug my gaps in experience.

i have to go to bed now. i only returned to delete another post i made and i saw this reply and i can answer better when i am not tired some other time.

Intuition isn't magical thinking. It's subconsciously noticing patterns and connections. It only seems magical because the mind is working behind the scenes rather than at the forefront of consciousness. Intuition often comes up in the context of making so-called "educated guesses". Not saying that intuition can't be wrong. People can make errors in intuition just as they can make errors in logic.

Well explained, marshall.

b9, if you can grasp radio waves, you can grasp intuition. Intuition is there even if you can't perceive it with one of the 5 senses.

That makes good sense. "I can't quite put my finger on it but something is wrong" is the Unsaid. Elsewheres in the forum, somebody posted a link to an article in a womens' magazine about "Signs Your Husband Is Cheating" (spelling out the Unsaid just in case any women were missing it). The poster noted with some horror that many of the "signs of cheating" were similar to things that AS husbands would probably do regardless, like withdrawing into his own activities. Some poor undiagnosed AS married man proibably got accused of cheating by his NT wife after that article came out. (I say undiagnosed because if he was known AS, withdrawal would be correctly attributed to the AS.) Talk about the Unsaid causing terrible problems! His wife's interpretation of Unsaid would be based on NT things and she'd get more and more suspicious, trying to catch him out. And he wouldn't even realize there was a terribly incorrect Unsaid hanging in the air between them and go about his merry way until she blew up at him. (But since he wouldn't be cheating, hopefully it ends well.)

Yay, I got that one right! It's all from my own analysis and research and observation, mind you. I never have a way to corroborate if I got something right or not.

Well, in the end, the wife falls inlove with the woman that she believes to be her husband's lover. The women start a relationship and the husband remains alone, never knowing why. This is in the movie that I saw (French independent movie, what do you expect?). The movie was about the Unsaid (in French, Le Non Dit). I happened to go to the cinema with a French friend, that's why I know it was about the Unsaid. Seems the Unsaid is very favored by the French, causing them all kinds of trouble in relationships.

Yea. I don't think relying too much on the Unsaid is a functional way of having a deep relationship with someone as there's too much false projection involved.

I'm guessing that the Unsaid is more utilized in non-close relationships with acquaintances. Reliance on the Unsaid is often part of a political culture. It's purposely designed to be exclusive and make outsiders uncomfortable. I usually think of gangs and criminal organizations that have their own hidden languages as the most extreme example of the Unsaid. But then it also shows up in certain corporate cultures, the military, the medical profession, other technical fields, and even academics. There's undue importance placed on understanding jargon and unwritten rules that often don't seem to have any logical purpose. Somehow being cryptic makes insiders bond and feel superior to outsiders. I do find it bizarre.

Do you agree with this? The above is my interpretation of the Unsaid. It's the part I have difficulty with because I find it so illogical and nonsensical to be purposefully confusing. Yet it's how the world operates because we're still monkey creatures that need to form exclusive packs to feel special.

Marshall, so could it be that we Aspies have problems understanding the Unsaid because we're never close enough to people for them to want us to become "insiders"? I'm confused now... Could it be that NTs are not in fact better than us at deciphering the Unsaid, but they're more briefed as to what's going on?

It's more than that, even--most of the signs that somebody is lying are things that are true of aspies normally. Things like fidgeting (stimming) or not making eye contact. This is part of why aspies get treated so badly. It's more than just missing things, it's giving signals that, in an NT, would mean something very bad.
Articles are the same way with signs that a guy might be dangerous. It's all stuff that's true of aspies as well.

This is why I keep saying that sociopaths are more convincing when they lie than aspies are telling the truth. Part of it may be that since most socialization and nonverbal communication doesn't come naturally, it is like lying.
It may be that the things going through an AS mind while attempting social interaction are almost the same things that go through an NT's mind while lying? Even when only the truth is being told, the interaction is fake.


The thing is, he could probably tell. You meant to eye-smile.. are you sure you did? Are you completely sure that you convincingly faked it, or did he have the feeling, the whole time, that it wasn't real?
Nonverbal language is not only about the stuff that you don't see.. it's about the stuff that others see in you. Whether it's there or not, whether you want it to be there or not, they see stuff an aspie just can't quite grasp.


The client doesn't want to see that it's not real. Even if he does, he ignores it. Not to mention that if he wasn't able to pick up a drunk girl in a bar anyways, he probably stinks at reading people anyways.

Edited to correct a typo

Last edited by Maggiedoll on 09 Aug 2009, 9:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Same here! And, my hand gestures equally confuse NTs!


I wonder if this is an indication of that TOM that I have trouble understanding. Because I feel that when my hand gestures don't make sense to others, it's because on some level, I think that they can see what I see while I am talking?

I have had a lot of experiences where I couldn't tell if someone was laughing or crying. It happens with movies, fairly frequently.


Exactly.



I enjoyed reading this post!

Something I found interesting is language pragmatics, don't confuse with when people mention "the pragmatics of language." The reason I think it may be "partly related" to the unsaid is because there's the literal meaning of what people say versus what they're really saying behind it, and people use context to communicate back and forth. Just like there are the fields of syntax and semantics in linguistics, there is pragmatics, which is a sub-field studying how context contributes to meaning. It goes beyond the linguistic information, to help us comprehend/use language. Although there appears to be different definitions of what's meant by "unsaid" in this thread, I wonder if pragmatics could have a say in all of them?

Something to consider, on the Simon Baron-Cohen's Autism Research Centre website there was a study which found both HFA and AS to be less adapt than neurotypicals at pragmatics, contained within the Central Coherence Theory. Although AS are better than HFA at it, they still on average are worse than NTs. The article says it's related to why many HFA/AS often appear as only details and no big picture people to others. http://autismresearchcentre.com/tests/lci_test.asp

An example that happened to me, earlier at a place I worked there was a hot woman who would wave at me in a girly way. Having scored 36 on the Autism-Spectrum Quotient test, you probably can imagine that I didn't know how to react. Then one day she was doing something and I said, "You shouldn't do that. It could hurt your teeth." I was being serious, no flirting on my part at all. Then all of a sudden she smiled, leaned forward, and said, "So why are you interested in my teeth?" I didn't say anything because I didn't know what to do (probably why I'm 27 and have only been on four group dates in my life, no single one-on-one dates). So there was the semantics of what she said, and there's the meaning behind it based on context. I've wondered why she couldn't have just said what she really meant so that I don't have to struggle with situations like this. From what little I've read from language pragmatics, apparently there's a very logical reason for this kind of speech, which NTs probably don't consciously think about. It's less awkward if a man doesn't do anything when she says something like that, versus if the woman were to be very direct/literal with semantics, and then get turned down. Although I was interested in her and missed out, apparently that's how most of the world works.

Or another example of language pragmatics, you're an apartment manager, and someone comes in saying, "Fix my sink," versus, "I think there's something wrong with my sink." Which sounds more polite? In the second one, how does the literal semantics compare to the real message? Are there times when you should do this versus times which you shouldn't? Based on some WP members talking about how they're always getting in fights with landlords, I have a hunch these language pragmatics may be involved, even if it's not intentional.

I think it may be a skill everyone on the spectrum should work on, even if it doesn't hinder them that much.

I agree



For relying on the unsaid, I think it would depend on the type of unsaid. As far as stereotypical unsaid social rules which everyone is supposed to follow, I would guess it's more with acquaintances than close relationships. Something I found in an interpersonal communications book (I probably should read it to work on my own social skills), is the closer the couple, the more likely they are to develop their own unique language/social rules for each other, just like they're more likely to make up personalized nick names for each other.

Another thing I was thinking about, people use context to fill in the gaps when speaking. The closer they are, perhaps the more likely they are to have shared context.

I'm better at the non verbal. The unsaid is a complete mystery unless it's my mother; then I can hear her not saying anything very clearly.

I thought that was kinda more an appeal to someone else's knowledge/abilities. (BTW, "else's" is coming up as spelled wrong. How is it supposed to be?) When you're asking somebody else to do something, usually it's either because you're paying them or because they can do something that you can't. (Or some of both.) In your first example, the order to do something feels like that person thinks they're better than the person they're telling to do something. In the second, while the intent is the same, it's more respectful because it's essentially asking for an information. (What's wrong with my sink? What needs to be done to fix it?)

Questions sound better than orders. Everyone is expected to ignore the fact that the question will become an order if the askee doesn't do what the asker wants them to do. Although for some people, this may just mean that questions translate automatically to orders when they're processed. (Once you've been yelled at for responding to a an order to do something phrased as "do you want to __________?," it stops seeming much better.)
NTs like choices, or at least to feel like they have choices. There are lots of choices that are there purely to make people feel empowered. All the choices may be identical, but people feel better that they have a choice between multiple identical things. And then if the thing that was chosen has problems, the chooser can be blamed-- even if there would have been the same problem with any of the choices.
Personally, choices tend to scare the heck out of me. Just try asking me, for example, if I want butter on my popcorn, or what time I want to do something, and you can watch the look of panic wash across my face..