Social skills and stress management training to enhance patients' interpersonal competencies.

23 adult male psychiatric outpatients, who showed evidence of marked interpersonal impairment or social isolation and absence of florid psychotic symptoms or organic brain damage, received social-skills training alone (mean age for this group was 48.4 yrs) or in conjunction with stress-management training (mean age for this group was 46.7 yrs) in 9 sessions. Nine additional men (mean age 53.4 yrs) were assigned to a minimal treatment control group. Social-skills training included modeling, coaching, covert and overt rehearsal, corrective feedback, social reinforcement, and homework assignments involving 5 response classes of social behavior. Stress-management training covered applied relaxation and cognitive restructuring procedures aligned with the same 5 response classes. Compared to the control group, Ss in both treatment conditions showed significant improvements on behavioral measures of social skill. Improvements continued during a 4-wk follow-up period and generalized to new situations not addressed in training. Neither treatment condition had an impact on self-reports of social anxiety or self-esteem. (36 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)