How to Read Your SST Results: What Your Social Skill Profile Actually Means

Your CommStyle SST result gives you a multi-dimensional profile of your social skills, scores across each of the core dimensions of social functioning, rather than a single overall number.^[1] This guide explains what each dimension measures, what different score levels look like in everyday interaction, what typically drives each pattern, and how to use your results to guide targeted, effective development.

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Before You Read: How to Use This Guide

Your profile is more useful than any single score, since the value of a multi-dimensional assessment is in understanding the pattern, where your strengths are clustered, where the gaps are, and how the dimensions relate to each other.

Scores describe tendencies, not fixed traits — social skills are learnable and changeable, and your scores reflect where you are now, not where you'll always be.^[2] And lower scores aren't failures, they're starting points, specific places where targeted development will produce real gains.

Conversation Initiation and Maintenance

Conversation initiation measures your ability to start interactions appropriately, making an opening comment or finding a natural entry point.

A high score means you can start conversations with both familiar people and strangers without significant anxiety, and you don't wait for others to initiate most interactions.

A low score means starting conversations feels genuinely difficult, and you may remain on the periphery longer than you'd like, waiting for an entry point that doesn't quite arrive.

This pattern often reflects a combination of skill deficit and anxiety, and research has found that behavioral rehearsal of specific initiation strategies significantly improves this dimension.

Conversation maintenance measures your ability to keep a conversation going, asking follow-up questions and managing turn-taking until it reaches a natural conclusion.

A high score means conversations with you have flow, with few awkward silences, and you ask follow-up questions that invite more sharing. A low score means conversations often feel effortful, and you may run out of things to say, particularly with people you don't know well.

This often reflects limited experience with varied social contexts, limited skill in using questions to explore others' experience, or anxiety that consumes the cognitive resources needed for fluid conversation.

Active Listening and Nonverbal Communication

Active listening measures the quality of your attention and responsiveness, whether you genuinely receive what others communicate, both content and emotional dimension. A high score means others feel genuinely heard when they talk with you, and you can recall what was said accurately.

A low score means others sometimes repeat themselves to you, and you're often formulating your response while they're still speaking.

This often reflects habit, automatic response preparation, rather than indifference — research shows that deliberate attention practice, resisting the impulse to plan your response until the other person has finished, produces significant improvements.

Nonverbal communication measures how effectively you read and use body language, facial expression, eye contact, and tone. A high score means you read others' emotional states reasonably accurately, and your own nonverbal communication supports what you say.

A low score means you sometimes misread social situations because you're missing nonverbal signals, and your nonverbal behavior may undermine your verbal communication.

This can reflect limited feedback about one's own nonverbal behavior, limited practice reading others' cues, or anxiety that reduces cognitive resources available for the nonverbal channel.

Empathy and Assertiveness

Empathy and perspective-taking measures your capacity to understand others' experience from their perspective, to see the world as they see it.

A high score means you can hold others' perspectives as genuinely valid even when they differ significantly from yours, and others feel genuinely understood when they share things with you.

A low score means you may understand events from your own perspective clearly but find it harder to inhabit others' viewpoints, and empathic responses can feel effortful.

This is partly a cognitive skill and partly an emotional one, both developable, cognitive perspective-taking through deliberate practice and emotional responsiveness through learning to slow down and attend to others' experience.

Assertiveness measures your ability to express your own needs, opinions, and feelings clearly and respectfully. A high score means you can express genuine opinions including when they differ from others', and you can say no without excessive guilt.

A low score means genuine opinions often go unexpressed, and your needs often go unmet because you didn't communicate them clearly.

This typically reflects a combination of beliefs, that expressing needs is selfish, anxiety about negative evaluation, and skill gaps in how to frame assertive expression, and development addresses all three.

Conflict Management and Relationship Maintenance

Conflict management measures your ability to engage with relationship conflict constructively, addressing issues directly while managing your own emotional response.

A high score means you can raise concerns without attacking the person, and conflict, when it occurs, gets resolved rather than avoided or escalated. A low score means conflict tends to be either avoided or escalated, and hearing critical feedback activates significant defensiveness.

This typically reflects high emotional arousal in conflict situations, limited skill in raising concerns without criticism, and avoidance patterns reinforced by short-term relief.

Building and maintaining relationships measures the skills of sustaining relationships over time, staying in contact and investing beyond immediate interaction. A high score means relationships in your life have depth and duration, and you follow up on things people have shared with you.

A low score means connections often remain at the acquaintance level, and relationships often feel more like your effort than a shared investment. This often reflects limited follow-through habits, difficulty with self-disclosure, and limited skill in repair after difficulty.

Using Your Profile: The Development Principle

The most important principle for using your SST profile: start with the dimension where development will have the most impact, not necessarily the one with the lowest score.

The highest-impact dimension is typically the one functioning as a constraint, the skill gap that most limits your social functioning across the contexts that matter most to you.

Look at your profile and ask which dimension, if significantly developed, would most change your social experience and relationships, and start there.

This article was developed with oversight from a Certified Public Psychologist (Japan). It's intended for informational purposes and doesn't constitute clinical advice.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a high score mean on the Social Skills assessment?

A higher score indicates that the capacities measured in this dimension are more developed or more prominently expressed in your current functioning. The specific meaning varies by dimension — read the dimension-specific explanations above for what higher scores suggest in practical terms.

What does a low score mean on the Social Skills assessment?

A lower score indicates a development area rather than a fixed deficit. All dimensions measured are developable, and lower scores identify where deliberate practice would be most impactful, as described in the dimension explanations above.

How accurate is the Social Skills assessment?

The assessment is a self-report tool, so it captures how you perceive your own functioning across the measured dimensions. Research on self-report psychological assessments consistently finds they're meaningful predictors of relevant outcomes, while also being subject to self-perception biases.

The most accurate use of results combines self-report scores with honest feedback from people who know your behavior well.