We use social skill training to develop social intelligence and enhance positive interpersonal skills including social thinking and social communication

Social intelligence is a broad term to describe the numerous components that are involved in social-emotional processing.  Social skills are usually defined as the skills that are used during social encounters and interpersonal relationships.  Social abilities are not always developed automatically but rather are learned directly. Social Skills Training (SST) involves explicit teaching of social awareness, perspective taking, social thinking, social interaction acts and social communication. The following skills are examples of those developed through SST:

Social-Emotional Awareness

• Ability to identify emotions in self and others
• Ability to communicate feelings and thoughts to others
• Ability to manage emotions effectively

Interpersonal Skills

• Ability to respond to others with care and concern
• Ability to experience feelings of others
• Ability to identify and understand others perspectives
• Ability to identify and understand social conventions and expected behaviors
• Ability to use conventional social acts and inhibit self-focused acts
• Ability to use assertiveness appropriately and effectively
• Ability to recognize interpersonal conflict
• Ability to use problem-solving and conflict resolution

Social Communication

• Ability to recognize and use prosody and pragmatics in communications
• Ability to make inferences and understand hidden communicative meanings
• Ability to recognize and use social agendas
• Ability to recognize and use non-verbal forms of communication
• Ability to inhibit making assumptions and providing further explanations
• Ability to initiate and inquire through question asking