What Is Social Skills Training?

Social Skills Training: It is developed on the basis of behavior correction or behavior therapy. Training provides a learning-based response to develop effective interpersonal communication skillsthe method of gaining.

Social Skills Training: It is developed on the basis of behavior correction or behavior therapy. Training provides a learning-based response to develop effective interpersonal communication skillsthe method of gaining.

Chinese name

Social skills training

Applied discipline

psychology

Origins of social skills training

Social Skills Training is also called social skills training. In the 1970s, people thought that people were increasingly interested in social skills training. To borrow the words often quoted by Ebbinghaus, this interest is also a "long past." But there is only a short history. " For a long time, attention to social capabilities has not kept up with people's efforts in other societies and education.

Most people think that with the help of traditional social organizationshome, school, church, and workplacea person will naturally learn the right interpersonal skills. Once social maladjustment occurs, it is usually attributed to problems with socialization, such as poor parenting, poor education, and insufficient religious and moral training. The traditional mental health view does not regard social communication as a learned skill, but only treats interpersonal communication obstacles as the symptom that causes more basic deep conflicts or psychopathological problems.

Changes in the setup of social institutions often change the traditional functions they undertake, including the education and development of social adaptation capabilities. Since the 1970s, such changes can be sustained in societies with various cultural backgrounds, mainly including: family structure changes, the number of single-parent families and dual-employee families has risen sharply; the status of religious institutions has declined, It is increasingly difficult to provide people with a lot of spiritual support as before; schools have a heavier educational responsibility, students have different backgrounds and value systems, and behavioral performance in schools is more complicated. At the same time, a new social machine, television, has also had a strong impact on society. At this point, various social changes have finally matured the spirit of the era of direct education of social skills.

The two disciplines that have the greatest impact on social skills training are pedagogy and psychology. In fact, social skills training is indeed born out of these two basic disciplines. Throughout the history of education, the education of interpersonal communication, moral behavior, socialization, and values are not always explicitly identified as the goals of education, but in the hearts of educators, they have always been the education goals that are taken for granted. In terms of official regulations, the "character education" movement, which was popular in the United States in the 1920s, tried to use preaching education methods to teach leadership skills, decision-making methods, and standard people's behavior.

The influence of psychology on social skills training can be traced back to the rise of the behavior correction movement in the 1950s. Many psychologists who have been trained in traditional psychology and are only interested in understanding and reinforcing the learning process have begun to turn their attention to therapeutics. They use academic theoretical terms to redefine the concept of therapy, treating problematic behavior as the result of inappropriate or incorrect learning. The treatment at that time emphasized the procedures developed in the laboratory, with detailed descriptions of the goals of the treatment, and a person responsible for the treatment process. This role was usually played by teachers, trainers or enablers of new behaviors.

Theoretical foundation of social skills training

Social communication skills training is developed on the basis of behavior correction or behavior therapy. Training provides a learning-based response to develop effective interpersonal communication skillsthe method of gaining.

The theoretical basis of social skills training is the theory of behavioral therapy: Paplov believes that whether human or animal behavior is established through stimulation-reflection, in the complex social life of human beings, words and situations can also become conditional stimulation Causes conditioned reflexes of emotions and behaviors. If a person's special life situation establishes conditional connections, and his special emotions and behavioral responses do not conform to his cultural background or social behavior norms, he can also be corrected by establishing new conditioned reflexes.

Social skills training training method

The target group of early behavior correctors is those who are hospitalized for mental illness. Many early behavioral corrections focused on eliminating patient-specific, quirky, morbid, and anxious behaviors while imparting the skills necessary for correct behavioral performance. It is generally believed that patients with these chronic diseases generally lack the necessary social skills. But the question is whether this lack is caused by the lack of opportunities for patients to use social skills in the hospital, or whether they have never learned the right social skills at all. ^[1]

Most trainers are convinced that people who lack interpersonal skills must have never learned this important skill before. However, some people, such as Walpa, believe that patients may have acquired relevant skills, but these skills cannot be used normally because of being restrained by conditional anxiety. In addition, some researchers emphasize the role of cognitive factors such as negative expectations and self-evaluation. This view is in line with the trend of universal acceptance of cognitive theory in traditional behavioral therapy, and appears in the field of behavioral correction in the form of "cognitive-behavioral correction".

The primary goal of hospital behavior correction is usually to control, reduce sand, or eliminate nasty and erratic behaviors. However, after reaching the initial goal, patients or trainees may not be able to act in a socially acceptable manner, so they must be taught the appropriate skills.

Group training is a more economical treatment. It also has the advantage of enabling patients to get a lot of positive feedback from their peers. At present, individual training is sometimes used as a supplementary form of group training. Those who like this treatment emphasize that it protects trainees from the threats of interference, distraction and negative feedback from others during the treatment process.

Despite the variety of social skills training programs, they have many things in common. The difference between different training plans is that they don't believe in their focus, and the presentation of various content, the arrangement of the order, and the use of the method are also different. Various training plans contain the most content: (1) presentation principles; (2) imitation; (3) role-playing; (4) feedback; (5) homework or migration training.

1. Presentation of the basic principles of social skills training. Before the formal training begins, the trainees are generally given an overview of the skills to be taught. The content usually includes the meaning of the terms used, the relationship between skills and the daily life of the trainee. As far as certain skills are concerned, both of the above aspects are rooted in a certain cultural background, such as "confidence" and "dating". At this time, the trainer does not need to explain in detail.

The terms used to describe various social skills are not uniform across different training programs. For example, what is called "confidence" in one type of training plan, and in another type of training plan, you may experiment and deal with the behavior during the date. At a certain stage, the actual content of self-confidence training also includes training patients to face each other's eyes and directly expressing their own opinions. To date, there is no standard classification of social skills and their performance.

2. Imitation training. Although various training programs have different explanations for the causes of patient behavioral deviations, some people think that it is due to lack of skills, and some emphasize conditional anxiety, but clearly present a behavior model for trainees to learn. One of the essential content. The imitation process usually involves two aspects of cognitive behavior and explicit behavior. Demonstrations can be performed by reading written materials, watching movies, recording videos and listening to audio recordings. Most of the content of the demonstration is an example of the skills taught, but in the training process, in order to allow the trainees to learn to distinguish bad melons, some bad or inappropriate behavior should also be demonstrated.

3. Role-playing training. After the trainees observe the correct behavior, they have a chance to exercise. They can experience a variety of external and internal reactions, and trainers hope that this individual training will improve the right skills in real-life situations. Because most social skills involve interpersonal issues, other trainees and / or trainees are often used as supporting actors during training, and play a close role in the trainee's daily life. But some training programs use outsiders as supporting actors.

In role-playing training, the trainer usually acts as a "stage supervisor" to ensure the success of the exercise. They are always on the side of coaching, encouraging, and coming up with ideas, so that the trainee's behavioral performance can gradually and successfully approach the target behavior.

4. Feedback. Feedback and social reinforcement are essential components of any social skills training program. Feedback can be expressed as approval, praise, or encouragement, or it can be corrective in nature, supplemented by specific improvements that are likely to be accompanied by additional exercises. Some training programs, especially those aimed at young children or people with chronic mental illness, may also use physical reinforcements, such as the use of money, food, candy, etc.

Some social skills training programs use self-reinforcing techniques. In an effort to shift the basis of evaluation from the outside to the inside, the trainer tries to teach patients the skills of self-control, self-evaluation, and self-reward as an important part of skill acquisition and generalization.

5. Homework and / or migration training. Migration training is the area most overlooked. Psychotherapists and educators always spend a lot of energy in clinics or classrooms, and pay little attention to the important issue of how to make trainees transfer acquired skills to real living environments. Some social skills training programs have acknowledged and are beginning to address migration. The most commonly used migration-promoting technology is homework assignment. This practice is usually in the form of a contract, and trainers and trainees will perform the skills they have practiced at some point.

Social skills training migrates to reality

Another important way to help trainees to generalize their acquired skills to various life situations is to combine various migration-promoting factors. The so-called migration promoting factors are those components that can improve the training mobility during training. Gallantan and his colleagues proposed five migration-promoting factors: 1. Present the general principle, which tells trainees the correct concepts, rules, or strategies for the proper use of skills. 2. Simulate the truth, even if the training environment is as consistent with the real life environment as possible in both physical and interpersonal communication; 3. Over-learning, that is, during training, provide the opportunity to repeatedly practice the skills acquired; 4. Promote migration, that is, provide trainees with the opportunity to practice new learning skills in various physical and interpersonal environments; 5. Fully strengthen, that is, when trainees successfully use their acquired skills in real life, enable them to Get the most appropriate social (external) and self (internal) reinforcement. ^[1]