Are You A Good Listener? Test Your Listening Skills With Free Online Clinically Validated Self Assessment Test With Active Listening Attitude Scale (ALAS)

Background

A study was conducted amongst 219 participants. The participants were asked to think about a friend with whom they had a very negative experience of conversation and talking. Their physiology was measured, and they were found to be having a bitter attitude toward the conversation. Then, they were engaged with good listeners, and their attitude toward social interactions and conversation totally changed¹Itzchakov, Guy, et al. “The listener sets the tone: High-quality listening increases attitude clarity and behavior-intention consequences.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 44.5 (2018): 762-778.. Therefore, being a good listener helps people to reduce their social anxiety and attitude towards social interactions. Hence, a good listener is loved, desired, and sought after. Because a good listener listens well, which is rare these days, the people around them feel comfortable. Therefore good listening skill is important for your social acceptance and general well-being.

What is Listening

Listening has the following components

1. Our ear perceives sound.
2. It then runs a primary classification on the sound(like noise, music, talk)
3. If the audio has words, then the brain loads the language to make sense of the words.
4. Once a language is detected in which we are listening, the brain translates sound to the word.
5. Words are then formed as sentences and contextualized.
6. The brain then classifies the nature of the sentences(like learning, story, complaint, new information, reminiscence, etc).
7. The brain then classifies the relevance of the information.
8. Based on the perceived relevance, the brain allocates focus and provides priority to the audio processing.
9. Meaning is extracted continuously from the information.
10. Brain stores this information, the audio itself, the meaning, and the context in the temporary storage.
11. The brain then extracts emotions out of the tonality, information, subject, etc.
12. Brain couples data from other sensors like visual data from eyes, smell, etc, to make the auditory content richer. This is called multi-sensory information.
13. The brain then activates the relevant muscles so that you can convey your emotions to the speaker.
14. The brain then chose an action(like a smile, shout, etc) based on this entire loop in real-time.

Therefore to be a good listener, you have to have not only good functioning of the ear but also a good functioning of many parts of the brain. Following are general wellness of the brain functions that are needed for good listening.

1. Sensors(ear, nose, touch, eyes)
2. Emotion
3. Cognition
4. Memory
5. Focus
6. Neuroplasticity(the connection between different parts of the brain)
7. Audio processing parts

Therefore, it can be said that if you are a poor listener, you may have mental health issues, and you must address them immidiately.

About Active Listening Attitude Scale (ALAS)

This questionnaire-based instrument was developed two decades ago by the Japanese team of Norio Mishima, and his Colleagues²Mishima, Norio, Shinya Kubota, and Shoji Nagata. “The development of a questionnaire to assess the attitude of active listening.” Journal of Occupational Health 42.3 (2000): 111-118.. The original scale had 47 items, the current scale has 29 items, and three additional items to correlate physiology, aging, and gender-related changes. For example, hearing ability diminishes with age. Females are in general better listeners than men. One with a high heart rate finds it hard to focus. This test has three factors:-

• Listening Attitude
• Listening Skills
• Conversation opportunity

Listening attitude represents the general psychology of an individual about listening. A poor listening attitude means that you are uninterested in others, and are completely self-occupied. You may just remember a few phrases from a talk and may fill the rest of the gaps yourself. This leaves a lot of scope for interpretation. This makes you irritated while listening to others. Therefore others also lose interest in talking to you and you end up being alone. Listening Skills on the other hand are the learned additional skills, like emotional expression, engagement, nodding, interacting, visualizing, remembering, and all the other factors. These are learned over your existing psychology. Good skills automatically improve the listening attitude, and vice versa. Conversation opportunity provides an understanding of how many conversation opportunities you will get at the end. If you are a poor listener, people will avoid you, and you will not get many chances to listen in the first place.

Reliability of the Instrument

ALAS is a gold-standard instrument and has been quite well adapted in various fields in the last 20 years. This has been translated into various languages and is tested. The instrument is compared with other instruments tested. CrunchBase Alpha for the three factors were 0.82, 0.73, and 0.72 respectively³Itzchakov, Guy, et al. “The listener sets the tone: High-quality listening increases attitude clarity and behavior-intention consequences.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 44.5 (2018): 762-778.. Therefore the instrument is valid, reliable, and stable.

Clinical Relevance: How Clinicians Must Use this Tool

Listening impairment is not a recognized disorder in DSM-5, or ICD-10, but is one amongst many diagnostic criteria of developmental disorders and learning disorders. 2022 ICD-10-CM Diagnosis Code F81.9 Developmental disorder of scholastic skills, unspecified Poor listening skills can be used as a screening tool for early screening of F81.9. Applicable To

• Knowledge acquisition disability NOS
• Learning disability NOS
• Learning disorder NOS

• A group of disorders that affect a person’s ability to learn or process specific types of information which is in contrast to his/her apparent level of intellect.

Please note that: This test must not be used, even for screening of Phonological disorders (315.39 DSM-4)

Though a phonological disorder will automatically result in listening disabilities, a listening disability doesn’t automatically reflect a phonological disorder.

A clinician may use this tool as:-

1. Screening tool to detect learning disabilities. (ICD-10 F81.9)
2. As a root-cause analysis tool for social anxiety(DSM-5 300.23)
3. As a root cause analysis tool for depression disorder(DSM-5 296.20-296.36)

Relationship Counsellors may use this tool for:-

1. Active listening attitude analysis to analyze an individual’s ability to understand and converse with the partner.
2. The individual’s likability score in a relationship.
3. The individual’s general lack of interest in the partner.

Use of ALAS in Psychology and Counselling

1. Every psychologist, clinician, and patient executive must take this test. Good listening is a primary criterion of being a good doctor.
2. Patients before attending a clinical session may be advised with this test to classify their listening levels and to customize talks accordingly.
3. HR personnel must take this test to know how good they are with people management.
4. Good listening is one of the primary requirements for any constants in any field.
5. This can be used to classify the students in a class, cluster the poor listeners, and provide them with better learning abilities.

Pathological Relevance

Though there are few direct correlation studies of listening skills with the pathology, you may find that poor listeners generally have a higher heart rate. Following pathological investigations must be done for anyone with impaired listening skills

1. Blood pressure(poor listeners may have a high/low blood pressure, vice versa may not be true).
2. Increased Androgens in Females(Increased Testosterone, Adrenaline), and low Estrogens.
3. Increased Cortisol levels.
4. Insomnia and Sleep Apnea.
5. Investigation of Gut Health and Vitamin B12 Levels.
6. Digestion disorder.
7. Fatigue.

Please remember, poor listening skills make one impulsive and amygdala driven, rather than prefrontal cortex driven. Therefore, the Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenaline axis remains hyperactive, and the Parasympathetic system gets impaired over a period of time.

Self-Assessment Who, Why, and How to Use this Tool

Any individual who is suffering from loneliness, social isolation, social anxiety, and who has convinced themselves that they are introverts, must take this test. Core to social interaction and social likability is being good at listening.  If you are working on self-development and improving self-awareness, then this tool will help you significantly to work on one of the major aspects of self, which is listening abilities.

How to Use this Tool for Self-Development

1. Take your test.
2. If you find that you are a decent or poor listener, use the article given at the end of the test as a therapeutic tool to improve.
3. Follow the steps, for 15 days. Take the problem head-on, and go and listen to as many people, in different setups as possible, implementing the skills.
4. After 15 days, take this test again. Repeat, till you become a good listener.

How to Interpret the Test Result

1. Scales are arranged in High to Low order. (For example, if you had a poor attitude, but good skills, then good skills will appear before attitude.
2. The chart represents the distribution of the scales.
3. The final result is classified as Poor/Decent/Good Listener.
4. You can take the PDF version of the result. In PDF, the chart will not appear.
5. You can keep a screenshot of the test results for personal reference.

Improve Your Listening Skill With This Article

How to Become a Better Listener and Why Good Listening Skill Helps to Improve Social Skill? - Lyfas One 360° 24x7 Proven Scalable AI Digital Health Platform

How can you improve your social acceptance and likability by becoming superiors listener? You need to focus, concentrate and be genuinely interested in other people, for others to be interested in you. How can you become better listener?

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Disclaimer

This test is provided as-is. Acculi Labs Pvt. Ltd. and Lyfas take no responsibility for the harm arising from taking the test including Hypochondriasis, mental trauma, and others. The results of this test can not be used as evidence in a court of law. No institutional actions, legal actions, and disciplinary actions can be initiated based on the results of this test. Furthermore, we take no responsibility for the validity and accuracy of the test. This is adapted from the original ALAS. This is an anonymous test, and we do not capture any sensitive data of yours that reveals your identity including your name, GPS, mobile number, etc. However, we log your IP address along with the final test result(not individual answers).

Prescribing Medicines

No medicine can be prescribed solely based on the results of this test, without a physical examination and implementation of other standard clinical protocols such as clinically correlating the test results. By taking the test you agree to not hold Acculi Labs Pvt. Ltd. Bangalore and Lyfas are not responsible and liable for any damage or harm.

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