RCT Social Cognition Training and Therapeutic Alliance Focused Therapy for Persons With Severe Mental Illness

The AIHQ is a measure of attributional style for situations with negative outcomes and ambiguous causality. Participants are asked to read each of five vignettes, to imagine that the scenario is happening to her or him, and to write down the reason why the other person acted the way he did toward the participant. Two independent raters subsequently code this written response for the purpose of computing a hostility bias. The participant then rates the degree to which he or she thinks the other person performed the action on purpose, how angry this action would make the participant feel, and how much the participant would blame the other person. Four scales that are calculated: Hostility Bias, Blame Score, Aggression Bias, Intentionality Bias (each is a 5-point Likert scale) . In the total scores, each scale can be range from 0 (min) to 25 (max), with higher scores indicating greater attribution of hostile intent, blame, or aggressive response tendencies.

Time frame: This outcome measure was assessed at baseline (Pre-intervention) and at 6 months later (Post-intervention).

Population: Each participant underwent a baseline evaluation prior to his participation of one of the groups (=PRE group), and underwent another evaluation at the end of the group intervention (=POST group, at 6 months)

The Faux Pas Task is a social cognition assessment tool that measures the ability to detect and understand social faux pas - situations where someone says something they shouldn't have said because they didn't know or realize certain information. Faux-Pas task in its Hebrew version (Shamay-Tsoory, Tomer, Berger, Goldsher, & Aharon-Peretz, 2005) was used to assess TOM. It consist of 10 stories in which a faux pas has occurred and 10 control stories. It assesses emotional and cognitive attributions and the score for each story ranged between 0 to 7. After each story the participants are asked six questions regarding the recognition of faux-pas (understanding the mental state of speaker and listener, understanding the emotional state of the listener). The total score ranges from 0 to 70, when higher scores indicate better ability to detect social mistakes.

Time frame: This outcome measure was assessed at baseline (Pre-intervention) and at 6 months later (Post-intervention).

Population: Each participant underwent a baseline evaluation prior to his participation of one of the groups (=PRE group), and underwent another evaluation at the end of the group intervention (=POST group, at 6 months)

The SSPA is a verbal role-play assessment in which the subject participates in two 3-minute role-play conversations (scenes) with the assessor on pre-determined topics (e.g. Your landlord has not fixed a leak that you told him about last week, and now you are calling him on the phone to follow-up.). Role-plays are tape-recorded and rated by independent coders. Each one of the 17 domains is rated on a 5-point Likert-type scale. Thus, the total score for the task can be ranged from 0 (min) to 85 (max), with higher scores signifying greater social skills. The SSPA has good face validity as a social skill measure and among individuals with schizophrenia it shown excellent inter-rater reliability, good test-retest reliability, and good convergent validity with a measure of activities of daily living. It is a 5-point Likert-type scale with higher scores signifying greater social skill.

Time frame: This outcome measure was assessed at baseline (Pre-intervention) and at 6 months later (Post-intervention).

Population: Each participant underwent a baseline evaluation prior to his participation of one of the groups (=PRE group), and underwent another evaluation at the end of the group intervention (=POST group, at 6 months)

A widely used measure of emotion perception and is indexed by the total number of correctly identified emotions out of nineteen pictured faces (higher number indicates better emotion identification).

Time frame: This outcome measure was assessed at baseline (Pre-intervention) and at 6 months later (Post-intervention).

Population: Each participant underwent a baseline evaluation prior to his participation of one of the groups (=PRE group), and underwent another evaluation at the end of the group intervention (=POST group, at 6 months)

The Wisconsin Quality of Life Scale (W-QLI) is a multidimensional assessment tool designed to measure quality of life, particularly for individuals with mental illness. The scores range from 0 to 7, with the higher score indicating higher social QoL.

Time frame: This outcome measure was assessed at baseline (Pre-intervention) and at 6 months later (Post-intervention).

Population: Each participant underwent a baseline evaluation prior to his participation of one of the groups (=PRE group), and underwent another evaluation at the end of the group intervention (=POST group, at 6 months)