Intervening with adults

Social skills facilitate meaningful and rewarding interactions with others. Functional impairments in social skills place individuals at risk for adverse social, occupational, mental, and physical health outcomes. In this chapter, we provide an overview on social skills training (SST) programs that can help adults acquire and implement effective social skills. We identify key principles underlying social learning theory and review implementation and service delivery considerations among adult populations. Extant programs serve a variety of presenting concerns, including but not limited to adults with neurodevelopmental disorders, mood and depressive disorders, serious mental illness such as schizophrenia, and problems such as traumatic brain injury and couple distress. Intervention targets with adults often include enhancing communication, relationship, social cognitive, and independent living/vocational skills. We review exemplar programs that have supportive research evidence and discuss future directions for SST programs for adults.