Preface: Practitioner's guide to empirically based measures of social skills

Over the past five decades, research has begun to catch up with intuition in confirming the inextricable links between social and psychological functioning. At each and every develop mental level, social skills deficits and problematic social relationships contribute to a wide range of more normative adjustment difficulties and clinical disorders. In fact, almost half of the Axis I clinical disorders and almost all of the Axis II personality disorders listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR; APA, 2000) have problematic social functioning as a criterion and the majority of the remaining disorders have important social implications. Indeed, the diverse range of associated presenting problems just about guarantees that practitioners will conduct some form of social skills assessment and training either as a primary intervention or as part of a treatment package. In this volume, we provide a single, comprehensive, “go to” resource to help guide such efforts.