Performance-based assessment of social skills in a large sample of participants with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and healthy controls: Correlates of social competence and social appropriateness.

Introduction: Performance-based assessments of social skills have detected impairments in people with severe mental illness and are correlated with functional outcomes in people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The most common of these assessments, the Social Skills Performance Assessment (SSPA), has two communication scenarios and items measuring both social competence and appropriateness. As real-world competence and appropriateness appear to have different correlates, we hypothesized that SSPA Items measuring competence and appropriateness would be distinct and have different correlations with other outcomes.