Teaching interview skills to mentally retarded persons.

Five types of behavior found to be predictive of impressions made by mentally retarded persons in interviews were designated as targets of interview skills training: responsiveness to questions, speech intelligibility, eye contact, smiling, and attractiveness. Two training conditions, using an instruction-modeling-rehearsal-feedback format and differing only in type of feedback (video tape and verbal vs. verbal alone), were compared to a placebo condition. Although formal training proved to be little more effective than did the placebo experience, significant improvements in responsiveness and eye contact in the verbal-feedback condition and other trends pointed to the feasibility of improving interview skills with minimal intervention.