Explanation of Diagnostic Criteria in Everyday language

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Hello, I am new to this forum. When I signed up, I put myself down as "not sure whether I have Aspergers"; however, I would like to clarify it a bit. I did extensive research and read the diagnostic criteria. However, whenever someone asks whether he or she has Asperger syndrome, someone replies something generic like "can you pick up on social cues"? Similarly, when I checked some threads comparing different disorders/syndromes (eg. Aspergers and Social Anxiety), it is always said that for example "People with aspergers lack social cues while people with Social Anxiety simply feel anxiety". Often when I read these comments or diagnostic criteria, I don't quite know what is meant. Could someone clearly explain what makes someone an "Aspie"? I realize that often the criteria are vague for a reason, but for example, could someone explain with specific examples what is meant by "social clues", etc.? I am not asking for an idiot-explanation, but for an explanation that is clear.

Missing social queues would be like- do people sometimes comment that something you said is going too far or over the line? Do you find people sometimes getting angry at you for something you said, even though logically there is nothing wrong with it? Do you sometimes crack a joke and everyone just sorta looks at you funny cause they don't get it? Do you start to make friends and then suddenly that person doesn't seem to want to talk to you any more, and you can't figure out why? Those would be missing social cues.

Social anxiety can be learned but anyway- do you feel really awkward or uncomfortable in social situations? Do you try to avoid them (things like parties or sitting at the cafe just talking)? Do you realise you are awkward and have that gut wrenching feeling? Mayhap you got teased a bit in school and started avoiding people? That is anxiety.

What can happen is you realise you are making those social faux pas' and become anxious in social situations (would say this happened to me). This is why anxiety would be a common problem for Aspies. If you can't really ever remember any situations that make sense with the first paragraph then you probably just have anxiety issues.

Thanks, but you are still mostly only listing the symptoms of missing social cues. Could you or someone else give me specific examples of missing social cues?

There is a young women I know that has very pretty eyes. She smiles a lot, she is very nice to people, including me. But when she smiles at me, I can't figure out WHY. A smile means a lot of things. Sometimes it is flirtatious, sometimes just friendly, sometimes devious and manipulative, sometimes forced to cover up distress. Supposedly, I should be able to tell the meaning of her smile by context, body language, tone of voice, etc. But I can't. I know she's smiling and being nice to me, but I have no clue as to her real state of mind or motivation.

Exactly what I'm looking for. Does anyone have other examples?

Not being able to give specific examples of social cues is kind of part of the problem. I understand that there are apparently these "social cues" people give which I am supposed to pick up on in order to avoid the social faux pas', but cannot give examples as to what these social cues are, because I don't see them.

When I first started looking into ASD for myself, I was like "social cues?! what social cues?!?! everybody is and has been sending secret signals my whole life?!?!" I still don't know what social cues are, I simply recognize when I get "the look" and realize I've done something wrong, but don't know what, exactly.

Hope this is helpful. If you're asking "what social cues" like me you may be more on the ASD side vs. social anxiety.

examples of social clues and missing them
way back in high school I can remember my 1st meeting with a shortime girlfriend (longtime my heart destruction machine) in any case after we had been hanging out and talking for hours, I went to give her a hug, and was in fact supprised when she kissed me, I can still recall saying thank god the feeling is mutual. Odds are she had been giving clues all night that she was interested as well, mind you I had missed them all, and noticed only that this was someone who was able to draw me out and get me talking, and even seemed interested in what I was saying once it happened, ie the conversation didn't just suddenly die.

other social cues that I know I missed over the years,
in a social situation (such as a party,or small gathering for intoxicating purposes) it would be fairly common that I would find myself the only one left in the room after on e or two people initially went to another location, eventually everyone else would follow. right over my head

social cues are hard to specifically define, you could say body language, but I would be the last one in the room because I wasn't interested in what the 1st people who left were going to do, so arguable that is some of the Aspie wireing , like why do I want to watch you do kegstands till you barf, (oh because that is were the conversation had moved to)

I will tell you I got my degree in psych, so I am quite familar with the dsm wordings, and how they lay out diagnosies. (mind you I can't spell, hint hint mods auto spell check option like on open office) and It was really in talking to other aspies that I came to see it as being obvious. and I basically made a case when I went in to be diagnosed. how this has effected my life from childhood onward, siting plenty of examples of aspie tendencies, making sure to include social relationships and employment issues, (hint hint you gotta give them the info that they are looking for but don't know how to get)

I don't really know how to say what social cues I missed. I can only say after the fact, when I know something was missed or something changed but I don't know the social cue I missed, so can't give any more info.

Just one I notice a lot is meeting new people. It might be I start talking to some. Maybe friendship starts forming. Then one day they are just like "hello" and move on. I don't know at what point the friendship died. I don't know why. Did I say something wrong the previous day? I just don't know. I just sort of get passive-aggressively excluded from the group with no idea why. Again this happens to me a lot and I just don't know why.

Anxiety in social situations is like- you want to avoid social situations. You get the butterflies in the stomach feeling. Maybe you specifically avoid walking a certain way because you might see someone otherwise, and you don't want to talk to them.

Missing social cues is the confusion. Something happens or changes and you don't know why, don't understand the reason for it. Like maybe you have a habit of looking down when someone is talking to you and they get annoyed because "you aren't listening". You are listening so why are they annoyed? The eye contact thing is brought up a lot but that would be the example. You don't relate that eye contact is expected so get confused when they get annoyed.

“Social cues,” as I’ve seen them defined, could be anything from facial expressions, body language, subtext in conversations, respecting other’s distance, hand gestures, making eye contact, etc.

The trouble, in my opinion, is that those of us who have gone through our childhoods under the radar probably don’t recognize that we’re bad at these things. We can watch a cartoon and tell the difference between the angry-faced villain and the smiling hero. We understand that when someone crosses their arms across their chest or clenches their fists, they might be angry. We’ve learned by watching others or through past mistakes, and we’ve adapted to what we don’t intuitively know. We don’t think we’re bad at these specific things because we aren’t completely socially incapable. It is an impaired ability to do things like read people’s faces or understand body language, not a complete lack of the ability to understand any social cues. No one on earth with a normal IQ or higher has an inability to read social cues. If you have ever watched a show on TV and been able to tell that the housewife was angry when she looked at the broken vase on the floor or that the kid was happy when she won the basketball game, you have some ability to read social cues.

I know it probably seems like it, but I’m definitely not trying to give an idiot-explanation here. My point here is that social cues can be tricky. I didn’t think I had any problem reading people or reading between the lines, I just thought I was bad with people. Then I started looking a bit closer at my own behavior.

To get a better view on how well you read faces, take the Baron-Cohen “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test. (I can't post links. The website I took the test at is the glenrowe one.) I’m no psychiatrist, but I would suggest looking at the picture, forming your own opinion of it, then looking at the answers instead of trying to match the best word to the picture. That is how I took this test and it really taught me a lot about myself. I’d look at the pictures and describe them as “kind of happy/mad/sad,” then look at the answers and have no idea how any of those could fit. I made my sister (who is an incredibly neurotypical cheerleader) take the test, and thanks to her bad habit of verbalizing her thought processes, I got a bit of an insight in to how she saw them. She’d describe them as “she looks like she’s looking at a hot guy across the street,” just for an example. She had a story for almost all of them, whereas I just got a vague impression of “that one might be smiling, so that one’s probably happy.” This was how I came to understand that I have difficulty reading faces.

I think a good example of missing out on the subtext in conversations (being unable to read between the lines) would be that back before my senior prom, a group of girls I knew came up to me one day and started talking to me about prom. (I remember that at the time the conversation struck me as being kind of randomly timed, but I just assumed that talking about prom was just one of those things people who were actually excited about going to prom did.) Somehow, the conversation turned to how I didn’t have a date (because I didn’t see the logic in asking someone out when I wasn’t interested in anyone just to have a prom date). Next thing I knew, the girls were suggesting I go with this guy I knew. I tried to avoid giving a strongly-worded answer. It’s sort of my defense-mechanism to avoid saying the wrong thing. I just say the most neutral thing possible when I have to say anything personal about anyone. I basically made up an excuse, saying that I just didn’t know the guy that well, which was a complete lie because we’d been in many of the same classes since elementary school. The girls seemed kind of disappointed and the conversation ended. Prom came and went, then graduation, and then, nearly a year later when I was already in college, I saw the guy on campus. It got me thinking about that conversation and how odd it was. All of the sudden, it hit me over the head. He had wanted to ask me to prom and those girls were his way of figuring out how I’d react! It seriously did not occur to me at all that he might have been interested. That is the kind of subtext that could easily fly over the head of an eight year old. When a high school senior misses it, that’s probably a cause for concern. The great irony of it all is, if he would’ve asked me directly I would’ve said yes. If only he had known his potential prom date was a potential Aspie!

Another example I can think that is perhaps a bit less specific is that I got bullied a lot by people I considered friends in school and often didn’t even notice I was getting bullied. One example of this was my best friend my last years in high school and our falling out. We both met a guy at an anime convention. I could tell almost immediately that she was interested in him, so I backed off. (She laid it on pretty thick. It was hard to miss, even for someone like me.) After the convention, we became IM buddies with the guy. To make a long story short, she had an irrational jealousy of me that I wasn’t really ever aware of. She wanted to date the guy, and she saw me as being more his “type,” so she’d do things to put me down in front of him. (A valiant accomplishment, considering he was 200 miles away.) We’d be together at one of our houses, IM’ing him from the same computer. She’d basically make me play good cop/bad cop with her. She’d say things to me and then deny saying them to him. Anyways (really am trying to keep this brief!), this kind of thing went on for months. All I could tell is that whenever she left, I was angry and I didn’t understand why. I mean, I’d get kind of irritated while she was there, but it was a confused kind of irritated. I didn’t understand why she was pretending to be someone other than she was. The anger took me a long time to understand. Months, in fact. When it finally clicked, I was just amazed. She was my best friend, and she could basically do no wrong in my eyes. Why was she trying to hurt me? I had to be wrong. So I asked one of our friends about it, and she basically told me “No s**t, Sherlock.” I asked my mom and she said she’d seen my friend doing that for years in front of guys she liked. Even the guy she was trying to impress noticed it.

But in the end, everything worked out OK. I stopped being friends with her. (I pretty much cut her out of my life in a single, bloody stroke. Apparently, being the kind of person who burns bridges instead of trying to resolve issues is typical of people with AS. If friends break our “rules” for the relationship, we quit.) She started dating the guy, but he and I are still friends even though his girlfriend threw a fit and locked herself in a room when she saw my name pop up on her boyfriend’s PSN. The sad thing is that I’m gay. I was never after the guy, but it still ruined our friendship. : (

Just to go off on a tangent, I have done a bit of research into the differences between social anxiety and AS. Since you mentioned you’d looked into it too, I’m assuming that you’re also a bit confused about what the exact difference is. This was a big point for me when I was considering whether or not I had Asperger’s as well. I thought it might be helpful if I threw my two cents in.

People told me all throughout my life that I was shy and so I assumed I was. Then one day I woke up and realized that I wasn’t shy so much as reserved, and the key difference for me was recognizing what exactly about social situations made me anxious. If I was shy, then I would have been scared of approaching people in all situations. If that were true, then I wouldn’t have been the kind of person who could raise her hand in class and debate a topic, and I especially wouldn’t have been the kind of person who could argue the least-popular side of that debate without issue. I wouldn’t have been the kind of person who could go up on a stage and sing a solo in front of a huge audience. I do not have a problem with social anxiety because I am not scared of people. Where I have issues is when people tell me their problems and I don’t know what to say, or when I have to buy gifts for people (emotional reciprocity, I think that’s termed). I have trouble keeping a conversation going when we’re not talking about something specific. When I go out with a group of friends, I have trouble keeping up with the conversations (due to sensory overstimulation). I often have trouble joining in group conversations because I have to carefully think out everything I say before I speak so my words don’t get tied up, almost like I’m writing the script in my head before I say it. All of these kinds of things cause me anxiety, especially if I want to impress the person I’m with, therefore I do experience anxiety in social situations. But that anxiety is not born from being in a social situation, it’s born from the difficulties I have because of (what I suspect is) AS.

I know this is super long, but hopefully some of this helped!

That "superlong" post raises a very good point.

Did ur friends know that u were gay or was this something that u were still keeping to urself?

The idea this brings up for me is how much do NTs read into things ie topdown processing vrs bottum up processing.

Another poster discribed how thier sister would make up a story about the people in the faces test. To an extent i kinda think that this is the normal nt thing to do.
Much as the brain fills in the gaps in optical or visual stimuli, thier brains are filling in tge gaps in how they understand other people. Where us bottom up orocessors get lost in minute details , for example while talking to your boss getting lost thinking, like wow he should trim that nosehair or call it a mustache, rather than having ur own story of why they are saying and doing what they are

But this idea does make sense though right (usually people just look at me like I have 6 heads when I talk)

Oh, yeah, totally! I assumed that me being bad at reading faces was the explanation for why she had stories and I didn't, but I think your explanation makes much more sense. I only see what I physically see. I get caught up in the details while she makes intuitive leaps and assumptions because she's got the big picture. It makes sense that our brains would fill in the gaps in our knowledge about people since, like you said, it fills in our gaps in other areas.

That's actually a really interesting topic. I think I might go google searching and see if I can find any more information.

1) I think I read on somewhere that people with Aspergers see other people as extensions of themselves. What is meant by that?

2) By "wearing the same clothes", is it meant that people with Aspergers literally wear the same clothes a few days in a row or simply the same type of clothes?