Running Head: SOCIAL COMPETENCE
 

The author would like to gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Omer Elkan, Hyun Sook Park, Jim Christopoulos and Marlene Simon.

Requests for reprints should be sent to Tom Gumpel, School of Education, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel 91905 or TGUMPEL@VMS.HUJI.AC.IL.
 

The imperative for a reformulation of social skills training theory for adults with mental retardation is discussed. Current practices in social skills training for persons with mental retardation are summarized along with potential reasons for their concomitant lack of maintenance and generalization of treatment gains. In order to better understand the process of social skills acquisition, the concept of social competence must be redefined. A cognitive-behavioral definition and model of social competence and social skills is described which attempts to unify traditional social learning concepts with more recent advances in research and practice with persons with cognitive deficits, along with a focus on its utility in the training of social skills among persons with mental retardation.
 

Attempts to incorporate the concept of social competence into a definition of mental retardation have been under way for almost 60 years (Doll, 1935; Greenspan & Granfield, 1992; Sloan & Stevens, 1976; Tredgold, 1922, 1937); indeed, even Itard (1962) wrote that his objective in training Victor was to increase his ability to engage in appropriate social exchanges. Social skills training for children and adults with mental retardation has received increased attention from researchers and practitioners over the last several years (Abordo & Vreeland, 1987; Castles & Glass, 1986a, 1986b; Chin-Perez, Park, Sacks, & Gaylord-Ross, 1986; Clement-Heist, Siegel, & Gaylord-Ross, 1992; Davies & Rogers, 1985; Foxx, McMorrow, Bittle, & Ness, 1986; Park & Gaylord-Ross, 1989).

Professionals in special education are increasingly seeing the relevance of social skills training in the preparation of individuals with disabilities for employment and independent living (Breen, Haring, Pitts-Conway, & Gaylord-Ross, 1985; Castles & Glass, 1986a, 1986b; Chin-Perez, et al., 1986; Doll, 1935; Halpern, 1985; Park & Gaylord-Ross, 1989; Storey & Gaylord-Ross, 1987), and have found that appropriate social skills are instrumental for acquiring and maintaining employment (Cheney & Foss, 1984; Greenspan & Shoultz, 1981) and in fostering appropriate and meaningful social support (Nietupski, Hamre-Nietupski, Green, Varnum-Teeter, Twedt, LePera, Scebold, & Hanrahan, 1986; Siegel, Park, Gumpel, Ford, Tappe, & Gaylord-Ross, 1989; Storey & Gaylord-Ross, 1987).

Defining Social Skills

The purpose of any social interaction is to elicit positive reinforcement and avoid punishment from one’s environment. Definitions of social skills vary; some conceptualizations define these behaviors solely as overt behaviors such as eye contact and gestures (Castles & Glass, 1986a, 1986b) and finite verbal responses to finite social stimuli (Gaylord-Ross, Forte, Storey, Gaylord-Ross, & Jameson, 1987; Gaylord-Ross, Stremel-Campbell, & Storey, 1986; Storey & Gaylord-Ross, 1987). Other researchers use less molecular approaches to define social skills; according to their definitions, social skills are any learned overt or covert behaviors used in an interpersonal exchange to obtain or maintain reinforcement from one’s environment (Cartledge & Milburn, 1986; Kelly, 1982; Wildman & Wildman, 1980). These behaviors include, but are not limited to, overt and observable behaviors, are situationally specific, goal oriented and rule governed (Chadsey-Rusch, 1992). To label someone as socially skillful implies a judgement regarding the efficacy of that individual’s overt behaviors in a specific situation (McFall, 1982). Being socially skillful implies that in a particular situation an individual performed a behavior such that the potential for receiving possible reinforcement from the environment is maximized.

A model of social competence training focusing solely on the remediation of social skills attempts to train each molecular behavioral skill based on a task analysis using such methods as discussions, role-rehearsal, role-reversal and behavioral homework (eg., Gaylord-Ross, Haring, Breen, & Pitts-Conway, 1984; Van Den Pol, Iwata, Ivancic, Page, Neef, & Whitley, 1981). This lack of emphasis on generative social skills (the ability to continually create and execute behaviors skillfully in all situations and at all times) rather than on component behaviors may partly account for the low level of generalization and maintenance of treatment gains among different populations of social skills trainees (Breen, et al., 1985; Gaylord-Ross, et al., 1986; Misra, 1992; Storey & Gaylord-Ross, 1987; Trower, 1984).

A clearer differentiation between the concept of social skills and social competence is appropriate. Statements about a person’s social competence refer to the adequacy and efficiency of the covert and overt behaviors used to produce overt social skills; statements about an individual’s social skills level refer solely to the overt manifestation of this competence. Suggesting that a person is socially competent has three implications: that the individual appropriately used these covert skills to create the appropriate response to an external stimulus; that in a particular situation an overt behavior maximized the potential for receiving possible reinforcements and minimized the risk of punishment from the environment; and that if the same situation were to recur, these overt and covert behaviors would most likely again be judged as skillful (McFall, 1982).

A Model of Social Competence

Figure 1 presents a revision of Gumpel’s (1989) model of social competence based on an expansion of McFall’s (1982) systems approach to social competence and encompasses constructs described by Meichenbaum, Butler and Gurson (1981). The model discussed here encompasses six key areas: decoding skills, decision skills, performance skills, self-monitoring judgments, environmental judgments and cognitive structures.
 

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Decoding skills

Decoding skills refer to the processes by which incoming sensory information is received and perceived. A preliminary step in the reaction to any stimuli is the ability to receive that stimulus through a sense modality. Correctly decoding social stimuli refers to the individual’s ability to attend to, and discriminate between, different types of environmental stimuli. Gumpel (1993) has shown that persons with mental retardation perceive and understand pictures of facial affect qualitatively differently from their non-handicapped peers. In a comparison of interpretations of facial expressions between adults with mental retardation and their non-handicapped peers, Gumpel (1993) was able to show that adults with mental retardation were less able to correctly match pictures of facial affect with affect labels; and using sophisticated psychometric techniques (Rasch, 1960; Wright & Masters, 1982) he was able to show that these differences are also qualitative: adults with mental retardation perceive facial affect differently from their non-handicapped peers.
 

Decision skills

Decision skills are used to interpret a stimulus and generate possible response options suitable for an appropriate reaction. After the generation of possible response options, and the comparison of those response options with skills present in the actor’s behavioral repertoire, an appropriate and executable behavior is chosen for performance. Training of decision making and problem solving skills (D’Zurilla & Goldfried, 1971; S, Platt & Shure, 1976) has recently begun to gather momentum in training persons with mental retardation for a variety different vocational and social tasks (Browning & Nave, 1993; Park, 1989; Park & Gaylord-Ross, 1989). Social decision and problem solving with persons who are mentally retarded provide the individual with general strategies for dealing independently with social stimuli. For example, Brown and Nave (1993) used video clips in order to successfully promote this skill in a sample of 104 secondary school students with mild mental retardation.

Performance skills

Following the choice of an appropriate and executable response to the initial stimulus the individual must execute the behavior. Performance skills include verbal and non-verbal communication (eye contact, body posture, tone of voice, facial expression, body orientation) and molecular behavioral skills including verbal scripts such as the initiation or termination of dyadic conversation (Trower, Bryant, & Argyle, 1978). Exclusive focus on performance skills is clearly the most common practice in social skills training for persons with mental retardation; the ability to train clients in performing these social skills has been amply demonstrated by a large body of research literature (eg., Breen et al., 1985; Castles & Glass, 1986b; Chin-Perez, et al., 1986; Greenspan & Shoultz, 1981; Nietupski et al., 1986; Park & Gaylord-Ross, 1989; Storey & Gaylord-Ross, 1987) and needs no further discussion here.

Self-monitoring judgement

As an individual performs a behavioral skill, she or he continuously self-monitors to make certain that s/he is performing the skill adequately and that the particular skill continues to be the most appropriate behavioral response to the initial overt stimulus. Research in the use self-monitoring and self-management procedures with persons who are mentally retarded to promote social/vocational skills has blossomed in the recent past (for a review of this research, see Siegel et al., 1989).
 

Environmental judgement.

The executed behavior is also observed by others who may render a positive or negative judgement concerning its appropriateness and skill level. It is important not only to self-monitor; the individual must also continuously monitor environmental reactions to the executed behavior and make appropriate adjustments in that behavior. These observers will then react to the overt behavior by emitting a new set of external stimuli.

Cognitive structures.

Through the individual’s self-monitoring and through awareness of the environmental reaction to the behavior, conclusions are drawn which effect feelings of self-efficacy (Bandura, 1977, 1986) and levels of self-presentational anxiety (Schlenker & Leary, 1982); two constructs which are inversely related. Behavior perceived as both appropriate and skillful increases feelings of self-efficacy and reduces self-presentational anxiety; behaviors perceived as neither appropriate nor skillful will cause reduced feelings of self-efficacy and will increase self-presentational anxiety. Skills judged in a positive light will stand a higher probability of being repeated; skills that receive only negative reactions from others (as well as from the individual) will stand a lower probability of being repeated in the future. Social Learning Theory (Bandura, 1977, 1986) links maintenance and generalization of treatment gains directly with increased perceptions of self-efficacy. As the individual becomes a more skillful generator of behavioral options, he will become less reliant on external sources of change. Bandura (1986) writes that internal reinforcers, namely enhanced feelings of self-efficacy, assist in achieving generalization of behavior change. Both self-presentational anxiety and self-efficacy are purely hypothetical cognitive-behavioral constructs and can only be inferred; they are therefore graphically portrayed in Figure 1 surrounded by a dotted line.

The paradigmatic expansion outlined above is a necessary result of recent advances in the application of cognitive-behavioral concepts to theory and practice in working with individuals with mental retardation. Advances in understanding qualitative perceptual differences between persons with and without mental retardation (eg., Gumpel, 1993), decision and problem solving (eg., Browing & Nave, 1993; Park & Gaylord-Ross, 1989) and self-monitoring techniques (eg., Gumpel, 1989; Siegel et al., 1989) with adults with mental retardation lend weight to this theoretical shift in the conceptualization of social competence and social skills training. Concepts of social competence put forth by Bandura (1986), McFall (1982) and Meichenbaum et al. (1981) are theoretically sound, yet fail to include applied knowledge garnered from recent advances in cognitive-behavioral techniques specifically with persons who are mentally retarded. Accordingly, the model presented above attempts to merge these theoretically rich paradigms with recent advances in order to present the researcher and practitioner with a viable applied model.

A behavior analytical approach to social competence typically views social skills as an interplay between environmental stimuli that act as discrimintive stimuli (S^Ds) to cue the individual to perform a complex behavioral chain. Correct execution of the behavioral chain will result in environmental consequences which will then increase the probability that the specific behavior will recur in the future in similar situations. The cognitive-behavioral approach presented attempts to further define the covert cognitive behaviors in the chain.

For example let us examine a common social/vocational situation, common for an adult with mental retardation: being approached by a boss at work. The boss' greeting in its specific surroundings is an S^D for a reciprocal response. The S^D for this response must be correctly received and then perceived by the employee; s/he must then be able to interpret the boss' approach in the context of that specific social and vocational situation. As the S^D cues the worker for a response, the worker will engage in problem solving behavior by generating possible responses and choosing a response which is most appropriate and has the highest chance of being correctly executed (and will have the greatest positive reinforcing qualities).

While responding, the employee will monitor the effect that his/her response has on the boss. If the boss reacts to the executed behavior in a manner commensurate with what was desired and anticipated, that behavior will most likely be repeated in a similar situation in the future; if the executed behavior has a disastrous effect, the worker will be less likely to repeat that behavior in that type of situation again. Because of the individual’s own judgments regarding the effectiveness of the response, along with the boss' reaction to that behavior, the respondent's self-efficacy and self-presentational anxiety will change.

Conclusion

A process approach to social skills training (Gambrill, 1985; Gumpel, 1989, 1993; Park, 1989; Trower, 1982, 1984) regards the individual as an agent for his or her change. The individual is considered an active agent, suggesting that social skills training should emphasize the covert process of generating socially skillful performance rather than solely emphasizing the overt reproduction of component behaviors. By training clients in correctly decoding social stimuli, in appropriate decision making skills, and in skillful behavioral performance and self environmental monitoring, individuals will be able to internalize the process of creating socially skillful behaviors, enabling the future generation of skillful behavioral responses in a variety of settings. There is a growing body of research which suggests that components of this model present skills which are lacking in the behavioral repertoires of a large number of persons with mental retardation; additionally, recent empirical evidence shows that such “process” oriented approaches are effective in creating stable behavioral changes among clients with mental retardation (eg., Chadsey-Rusch, 1992; Gumpel, 1989; Park, 1989; Park & Gaylord-Ross, 1989; Sargent, 1991). Clearly, further research must be focused in this areto operationalize all aspects of this model.

It may be possible, however, that the cognitive-behavioral model presented above manifests itself differently at various stages of the learning process. During initial novice stages of skill acquisition, an individual may perform all of the stages of the model in a rather linear progression through the covert and the overt stages of the model. As the individual progresses from being a novice learner to an expert performer, s/he may begin to execute the different stages of the model in a non-linear fashion, s/he may also skip over entire parts of the model or may execute one or more of the sub-skills simultaneously.

As researchers and practitioners in the field of mental retardation increasingly see the need for social skills training with special populations, as well as the common lack of maintenance and generalization of trained skills over both time and social situations, the impetus for the development of a robust model of social competence applicable to this population becomes even greater. This paper attempts to point to a major theoretical flaw in the common treatment paradigm of social skills training for persons with mental retardation; it attempts to enable researchers and practitioners greater flexibility in designing their treatment approach. This flexibility is accomplished through a broadening of the conceptualization of social competence to include both overt as well as covert behaviors as well as its implicit reliance on the growing fields of perceptual analyses, social decision making and problem solving and self-monitoring training. By breaking down a complex series of behaviors into their component parts, the practioner and clinician will gain easier access to train these constituent behavioral units.

In this process approach, the focus is not on teaching specific molecular behavioral skills for transfer to new and specific situations, instead the process of deciding which skills to use and the correct execution of those skills are the focus of the social skills training intervention. As such, training persons with mental retardation in solely behavioral responses is inadequate; social skills training must include instruction in decision skills (interpreting the stimuli, social problem solving, generating possible responses, the ability to compare and then select response options from a "pool" of response capabilities) and in performance skills (actual performance of the behavior and self-monitoring and self-management of its execution and environmental reaction). Through teaching our clients the process involved in the generation of appropriate social skills, we will be training social skill instead of just social skills; in accordance with the colloquialism: Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.
 

References

Abordo, E., & Vreeland, A. (1987, April). Social skills training with the developmentally disabled. Paper presented at the meeting of the Northern California Association of Applied Behavior Analysis. San Mateo, CA.

Figure 1. A six-stage cognitive-behavioral model of social competence.