In researching children who misinterpret voice tones and expressions, he and his Emory colleague Marshall P. Duke coined the term “dyssemia,” meaning unable to translate nonverbal cues. These are children who end up outcasts because they can’t follow the rhythm of conversations or respect the boundaries of personal space. They miss the emotions their peers are telegraphing through facial expressions and body language and fail to sense a classmate’s mood based on tone of voice. The research suggests 10% of children demonstrate dyssemia severe enough to interfere with social or academic success.
“This is a set of skills that kids need to have; they need to learn this language of nonverbal communication,” Nowicki said in a telephone interview from his Atlanta home. “They can learn it informally in their lives, and parents can be very helpful. But schools are important and corrective. School is where you learn how to relate to your peers and to adults. It’s a lab.”
Nowicki is seeing a surge in children who haven’t yet learned how to decode nonverbal signals. He blames the rise in screen time, which erodes children’s opportunities to pick up on social cues communicated through expression, eye contact, voice tone and body language.
“As much as this was a problem when I wrote the first book, it is worse now because of social media,” he said. “Kids spending this much time online creates less opportunity for the real-life interaction lessons that you need to learn these nonverbal skills. When you finally have to play together as a team or interact with each other on a date, you need a whole different set of skills.”
Another cause is the COVID-19 pandemic, where children were isolated by school closings and remote classes. While kids already struggling with nonverbal skills lost a lot of ground, the pandemic even set back children who had not been floundering socially beforehand, said Nowicki.
Face-to-face interactions at school and on the…
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