
Social Skills - Impressions and Altruism
Social Skills / Impressions and Altruism

Impressions and Altruism
This activity is the next step after Attaining Targeted Impressions, because now students are tasked with not only thinking about the impressions their words and actions give others, but also with considering others' feelings. Students learn to recognize others' social emotional needs, such as the need to feel important or to avoid insult, while acknowledging their own needs: what they want and how they want to be perceived.

Impressions and Altruism
$ 4
I speak to my students often about altruism. I give them two reasons they should be altruistic: first, being kind to people and animals is the right thing to do, and second, it's in their self-interest. I tell them they will benefit from being kind. It will give others a good impression of them, which can lead to friendships, romantic relationships, comfortable interactions with acquaintances and strangers, and professional connections and promotions. The Impressions and Altruism activity goes a step further than Attaining Targeted Impressions because it also considers the other person's feelings in various situations. Given five straightforward social interactions, students take turns rolling a die to find out with whom they are interacting. They then answer five questions involving what they can say or do so that both they and the other person in the interaction can benefit. Note that in some situations what can benefit the other person is of less importance, such as when interacting with a job interviewer or a doctor.
Related worksheets to Social Skills
These social skills worksheets and activities for individuals with Autism and Social Pragmatic Communication Disorders target a variety of social skills, including the development of empathy, perspective taking, kinesics, listener/reader presupposition, and conversational skills


Editing Verbal Narratives Worksheets
Ideal for anyone who gives too much information, this social skills activity works on the ability to regard one's listener when choosing which information to include in narratives.

Entering Conversations
An outline of the steps necessary to enter a conversation already in progress, including body proximity, verbal strategies, and determination of acceptance.

Social Skills Worksheets: Polite Wording
Using this social skills worksheet, students learn to regard others' feelings by incorporating given “softening” words and phrases into opinion statements and requests.

Social Skills Worksheets: Tact
Using this social skills worksheet, students discuss provided tactless statements, learning to identify properties of offensiveness, bragging, over-generalization, and prejudice.

Speaking to Different Communicative Partners
While theory of mind involves understanding others' perspectives and being able to “put yourself in their shoes”, the subsequent ability of adjusting your own behavior accordingly is...

Social Skills Worksheets: Perspective Taking
These social skills worksheets assign students the task of observing social interactions and speculating on the emotional effect of those interactions on the participants.

Social Skills Activities: Developing Empathy
This comprehensive social skills activity includes extensive discussion, an activity, homework, and therapeutic notes, all targeting the ability to regard others' feelings.

Social Skills Activities: Writing A Complaint Letter
Another favorite! Both a writing task and social skills activity, this product improves the ability to regard one's reader when choosing content and wording.

Social Skills Worksheets: Elaboration in Conversation
This conversation skills handout rates a variety of answers to the same question in terms of elaboration, teaching students how to keep a conversation going.

Social Skills Activities: Kinesics - Interest vs. Disinterest
This activity is a great resource for teaching kinesics (the ability to accurately interpret non-verbal social cues) and applying that skill to conversations.

Social Skills: Communication Skills Questionnaire
Using this questionnaire, students can check which social skills they'd like to work on in the areas of conversation, practical skills, non-verbal, dating, and conflict.

Set The Scene
This easy-to-use worksheet provides educators and speech language pathologists with an effective way to teach students to provide orienting details when starting a simple, conversational story.

Being a Good Conversationalist
Teaches students the key aspects needed to be an engaged and engaging conversational partner. Includes extensive therapeutic notes.

Choosing Conversation Topics
So many students worry about how to choose good topics for conversation. This resource provides an easy procedure to help them choose.

Interviewing Others
The qualities that make a good interviewer also make a good conversationalist. This resource gives students a lot of practice conducting interviews.

Post-Conversation Questionnaire
This simple-to-follow questionnaire gets students to improve their perspective taking skills along with their ability to be introspective.

Tone of Voice
Accurately interpreting others' emotions from their tone of voice is one of the essential skills for positive social interactions.

Interpreting Non-Verbal Communication Homework
Generalization of skills taught during lessons is so important. This assignment gives students' further practice at reading non-verbal clues.

Impressions from Appearances
I've found this activity really illuminates for students just how appearances lead to impressions, and how those impressions may often be incorrect.

Attaining Targeted Impressions
Gets students to really think about what impressions they would like to give, to different people in different scenarios, and how they might attain desired impressions.

Impressions and Altruism
This resource targets not just how to attain desired impressions in interactions, but also how and why to consider another person's feelings.

Understanding Others Reference Sheet
By far one of my most helpful resources, this reference sheet is applicable whenever students are given a perspective taking task.

Greetings Worksheet
This resource is helpful when working on greeting skills and can serve as a user-friendly scripting tool for SLPs and other therapists.

Getting Someone's Attention
This activity helps students improve their ability to execute all the necessary aspects of the deceptively tricky task of gaining another's attention.

Restaurant Etiquette
As with all my materials, this handout includes instruction on perspective taking skills, along with all the dos and don'ts of eating out.

Answering Job Interview Questions
For older teens beginning to look for jobs, this detailed resource gives lots of instruction and practice at answering the four most common questions asked.

Passive Aggression
Not everyone our students run into has good intentions. This resource teaches adolescent students how to identify passive aggression and how to handle it.

Social Skills Activities Packet
A collection of all twenty eight social skills activities and worksheets covering conversation skills, perspective taking, empathy development, kinesics, and listener/reader presupposition.
