44 The Explosive ChildSOCIAL SKILLSThere are few human activities that require more flexibil-
ity, complex thinking, and rapid processing than social in-
teractions. Researchers have delineated a set of specific
thinking skills—known as social information processing
skills—that come into play in practically all social interac-
tions. A brief review of these thinking skills will help you
understand just how frustrating social interactions can be,
especially for children who aren’t good at them, and how
lagging social skills can set the stage for explosions.
Let’s say a boy is standing in a hallway at school and
a peer comes up and, with a big smile on his face,
whacks the boy hard on the back and says, “Hi!” The
boy who was whacked on the back now has a split sec-
ond to attend to and try to pick up on the important
qualities of the social cues of this situation (“Who just
whacked me on the back? Aside from the person’s
smile, is there anything about his posture or facial ex-
pression or this context that tells me whether this was a
friendly or unfriendly smile and whack?”). At the same
time he must connect those cues with his previous ex-
periences (“When have other people, and this person in
particular, whacked me on the back and smiled at me
before?”) in order to interpret the cue (“Was this an
overexuberant greeting or an aggressive act?”). Then he
has to think about what he wants to have happen next