Efficacy of ISST in Schizophrenia

The Integrated Social Cognitive and Behavioral Skills Therapy (ISST) is a newly developed treatment program. It is based on the Training of Affect Recognition (Wölwer et al. 2005) and common social skills trainings, which are combined in an integrated rather than a sequenced manner. ISST uses both repeated practice and strategy-based training, and consists of 12 individual sessions, 5 group sessions and 1 individual final session over a period of 6 months.

The Neurocognitive Remediation Program (NCRT) is based on a neurocognitive training already used as active control condition in our earlier studies (Wölwer et al. 2005, Klingberg et al. 2011). The present version of NCRT is matched in dose, mode and scheme of application to the ISST, but differs from the ISST regarding targeted cognitive domains and preferred training strategy (predominantly drill and practice based). The NCRT provides the same amount of group interaction and companionship as well as the same amount of guided community activity as in the ISST, but is structured in such a way that interactional behavior is secondary (e.g. by competition-like tasks rather than cooperative tasks). Thus therapeutic attention and commitment are held constant across study conditions.