dysfunction) for schizophrenia, some changes made in the A criteria should be
taken into consideration when planning to offer SST to a person presenting
negative symptoms and poor social functioning. Experts have found that avolition
and diminished emotional expression are key aspects of negative symptoms; and
they consider that diminished emotional expression describes better the nature of
the affect abnormality in schizophrenia than the affective flattening. Thus, the A
criteria’s fifth characteristic is now negative symptoms, i.e. diminished emotional
expression and avolition (Tandon et al., 2013).
Finally, the generalization of social skills to clients’ natural environments is
clearly one of the main challenges for clinicians when applying SST interventions.
In fact, they can be further supplemented by community-based in vivo skills
training (Glynn et al., 2002) and by enlisting “indigenous supporters” to prompt