Acceso usuarios
Tomoko Miyahara, Hiroko Kusaka, Daisuke Shimizu
People who have experienced traumatic brain injury (TBI) often present with cognitive-communication disorders. Social cognition, the understanding of other people’s ideas and beliefs, is one of the most important elements of cognitive- communication and is crucial for building social relationships. Interventions for social cognition should be individualized because the circumstances in which social cognitive impairment surfaces are highly individualized, but not enough research has been reported. In this study we focused self-awareness and self-regulation skills and investigated the effects of interventions for social cognition of a woman who experienced TBI more than 15 years ago. The study objectives were to: 1) examine whether self-awareness and social skills training (SST) interventions could reduce inappropriate behavior during habitual group activities and 2) investigate the change in self-regulation skills through interventions. A single-case experimental ABAC design was implemented in the following phases: A1 (six baseline sessions), B (eight awareness interventions), A2 (eight quiescence sessions), and C (six SST interventions). As a result, during the two intervention phases, the Participant was able to reduce her target behaviors compared to the non-intervention phases (t = -0.81–0.66, p <.05). The qualitative analysis of changes in the SRSI indicated that the Participant increased her self-awareness of behaviors in the focused group program. In conclusion, the awareness intervention and subsequent SST were effective in reducing the individual’s target behaviors in the specific situation. The relationship between self-regulation skills and the generalization of cognitive-communication intervention effects should be further studied.
