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Social Skills Training

 

Social skills training is a method of teaching people with serious mental illness who have social and emotional skill deficits how to improve these basic skills. The approach, which is based on behavioral learning principles, was developed by Robert Liberman in the 1960s. The method has enjoyed some popularity in the US but, although the social skills manual has been translated into 23 languages, it has not been adopted to any great extent in other countries.

In a typical course of training, after establishing a therapeutic alliance and conducting a behavioral assessment, the trainer and trainee will establish long- and short-term goals for dealing with a specific interpersonal problem and develop a scenario to achieve these goals through role-playing with other members of the group. The patient is encouraged to perceive how he or she might have handled a situation differently in the role-play and earns positive feedback for improvement in skills. When the patient is demonstrating sufficient skill, he or she may be given homework to practice with people outside the class. The final, and perhaps most difficult, step is to assist the patient in generalizing improvements in social skills into everyday, real-life settings.

It is the doubts about whether this process of generalization can be accomplished successfully, that has put a damper on the diffusion of the approach more broadly. A meta-analysis of studies of social skills training published in 1996, revealed that although the approach was effective in teaching patients interpersonal and assertiveness skills, few studies have examined whether training in the hospital setting generalizes to social interactions in the community. For whatever reason, adoption of the model has not been strong and Liberman himself reports that “its use is still limited to a relatively small number of behaviorally oriented practitioners.” *

* R.P. Liberman, Recovery from Disability, American Psychiatric Publishing, 2008, p. 271.