ABSTRACT
Future historians of psychology may find a certain irony in the fact that behaviour therapy which began partly as a reaction to traditional psychotherapies and their preoccupation with unobservable and unmeasurable thoughts and feelings, should find itself twenty years later grappling with those same thoughts and feelings that it was at first at such pains to avoid. Behaviour therapy has gradually gone “cognitive” (Mahoney, 1974; 1977) and social skills is no exception to this general trend. Nearly every current writer in the field is now careful to stress the importance of cognitions and subjective processes (Trower, 1979; Bellack, 1979; Yardley, 1979; Wallace et al., 1980; Eisler & Frederiksen, 1980). The question that is immediately raised by this shift in emphasis is: how are such cognitive processes to be measured? Bellack (1979) suggests that, “despite the importance of assessing the various social perception skills and associated cognitive parameters, no empirically sound assessment techniques exist” (p. 99, op. cit.). What would constitute “empirically sound assessment techniques”? What are the alternatives, and how might we set about investigating the relationship of cognitions to other aspects of difficulties in social functioning? These are the issues to be addressed in this chapter. Let us begin by reviewing briefly why cognitive processes are important and make it clear what sort of cognitions we are talking about.
