Social skills training with mentally handicapped people: a review

Four questions are asked about the use of social skills training procedures with mentally handicapped people. The first is, 'What are social skills in the context of mental handicap?', and it is suggested that they involve a complex array of perceptual, cognitive, motor and motivational processes, all of which can be disrupted due to various problems common among mentally handicapped people. The second question, 'What changes do social skills training programmes aim to achieve?', leads to the conclusion that most programmes have concentrated on motor, and to some extent on motivational processes, at the expense of perceptuo-cognitive ones. In asking, 'Have the programmes been successful in achieving these changes?', the answer is a guarded 'yes', given the limited aims of most investigators. Generalization to the natural environment has only occasionally been established, though it is often not measured. The fourth question is, 'What is the clinical significance of the changes obtained by such programmes and how can future ones be made more clinically relevant?'. The answer to the first part of the question is that, in general, their clinical utility has not been established. Future programmes could be made more clinically relevant if they were integrated with strategies for producing more benign and stimulating environments for mentally handicapped people.