ABSTRACT
The training manual draws extensively on research into the elements and processes of social interaction as well as clinical experience. However, as the preceding chapters have shown, the information now available is already vast and still rapidly expanding, and we have had to make inevitable sacrifices to keep the manual to reasonable proportions. In the difficult task of selecting the most relevant material we have included areas which, in general, seemed more fundamental, e.g. we have focussed more on face and voice cues and less on gestures and body movements, and more on basic, social conversation rather than specialised applications, such as interviews, business meetings, teaching, courting, public speaking and so on. This inevitably means we will not have covered some areas of deficiency. Some additional behavioural information is given in a descriptive form in the rating scale, and we suggest therapists use this and other sources listed later as background information for training patients whose particular deficits fall into areas not covered in the manual.
