Social skills training with institutionalized severely and profoundly mentally retarded persons

This paper examines the literature on training severely and profoundly retarded individuals in social skills. Experimental studies have focused mainly on three areas: (1) cooperative responding during play, (2) non-verbal physical or close-proximity interactions, and (3) conversational skills. Training procedures varied but usually involved combinations of physical and verbal prompting, modeling, shaping, and social and edible reinforcement. These studies provide strong evidence that severely and profoundly retarded individuals can be taught useful interpersonal skills and can sometimes even assist the development of these skills in their peers. In general, the studies were methodologically sound in terms of basic design and interobserver reliabilities but weak with respect to maintenance and follow-up procedures. Only some studies tested for generalization of treatment effects and only a few specifically trained for such generalization.