Social Performance Rating During Social Skills Training in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Schizophrenia

Social communication skills are crucial factors influencing human social life. Quantifying the degree of social communication difficulties is necessary to understand developmental and neurological disorders and to create systems for automatic symptom screening and early intervention methods such as social skills training. Social skills training by human trainers is well established. Some automated social skills training systems have been proposed in the past. The previous social skills training system used a revised roleplay test to evaluate human social communication skills. However, this scale was evaluated by specialists such as psychiatrists and was not based on a standard internationally used scale. In this paper, we propose applying a social performance rating scale to social skills training data to measure social communication skills. We made a Japanese version of the social performance rating scale that can be rated without special qualifications and has English and French versions. In a previous study, we collected videos of interactions between trainers and adults with autism spectrum disorder, schizophrenia, and control participants during social skills training sessions. Two raters used the scale to annotate the collected data. The results found social performance rating scale showed good psychometric properties for assessing social communication skills. We found significantly greater gaze scores in adults with autism spectrum disorder than in adults with schizophrenia. There were differences between the ratings of different tasks in the adults with schizophrenia and control participants. These results suggest that the social performance rating scale can be a useful tool to assess social communication skills in different cultures and different pathologies. Possible future directions include using the social performance rating scale for assessing social behavior during interaction with a virtual agent.