Social cognition training is designed to improve social functioning among patients with schizophrenia, autism and other disorders that prevent traditional methods of learning social skills from being effective.
Patients are taught to control emotions, evaluate a situation and combine what they learn from an experience with the rest of their knowledge.
Proper training can help patients to improve their perception of others emotional states, thereby increasing their chances of successful interaction.
Social cognition training is a relatively new field so there is not a great deal of formalized research that has been done on the subject.
Doctors, parents and other care providers have been working with and teaching these sorts of skill to patients with social dysfunctions for years, but the process has not been carefully documented and no large studies have been performed until recently.
Impaired social cognition prevents autism and schizophrenia sufferers from taking part in the society around them.
They often have very few or no friends, but not because of a lack of desire.
In fact, this is often the biggest thing missing from their lives.
Improving social cognition and allowing the patient to have positive interaction with other people can have a major impact on their mental well being.
Part of the challenge of training social cognition is figuring out methods to teach skill that come naturally to a large portion of the population.
The basis of these skills is the ability to perceive the emotions and intentions of other human beings.
The training begins with definitions of basic emotions and explaining the situations in which they are apt to occur.
This training is not something that can be taught in a day, but rather will require weeks or even months of dedication.
Pictures or videos of people interacting can be used to demonstrate different emotions and different situations.
Patients are first asked about facts of each image.
Then the training moves on to making guesses about what might be happening in each situation based on the facts that are known.
Trainers help patients distinguish which guesses are more likely to be accurate and attempt to explain why this is.
As important as it is to teach patients to make educated guesses about a situation, it is equally important to teach them not to make wild guesses or jump to conclusions that are not based on facts.
This requires a patient to deal with a certain amount of ambiguity that they may not initially feel comfortable with.
With practice, patients can learn to associate different facial expressions with the corresponding emotion even if they memorize them rather than truly understanding them.
After weeks of training, patients begin to build a base understanding of what emotions look like and what they mean about another person's intentions.
This base knowledge then provides the patient with a bank of information with which to compare the facts of any new situation to, greatly increasing the odds of their recognizing the emotions expressed and accurately perceiving the meaning of that emotion for the given situation.
This is a major step to being able to function in society and achieve a greater degree of independence.