Bornhofen 2008a.

Methods	Design: randomized, 2‐arm, wait‐list control trial. Duration of study: December 2003 to May 2004.
Participants	Number randomized: 12. 6 in each arm (outpatient volunteers with severe, chronic TBI). Gender: 11 men, 1 woman. Age range: 20‐57 years. Inclusion criteria: severe TBI (based on post‐traumatic amnesia); observed chronic social difficulty or isolation; awkwardness in social interactions; apparent disregard or lack of awareness of social cues; inappropriate social responding. Exclusion criteria: history of depression or psychosis; scores below borderline for premorbid cognitive functioning (Wechsler Test of Adult Reading); postinjury period < 9 months.
Interventions	Intervention: remedial cognitive programme. Designed to address emotion perception with 2 techniques Errorless Learning and Self Instruction Training. Emphasis was on graduated practice of increasingly complex, guided tasks relevant to perception of static and dynamic emotion cues. Greater independence was promoted as ability improved. Task requirements included group activities, notebook maintenance and home practice tasks. Duration: 1.5‐hour sessions, biweekly, for 8 weeks. Control: wait‐list. 1 week after the completion of 8 weeks of treatment for intervention group, the wait‐list group received the same treatment.
Outcomes	Generalization measures: SPRS (self‐reported). Identification of Static Emotions: 2 facial expression tasks (labelling and matching emotions from Ekman and Friesen's photographs). Labelling of dynamic audio‐visual emotional displays: TASIT, Part 1. Identification of social inferences based on emotional demeanour: TASIT Parts 2 and 3.
Notes	Setting: outpatient services, Liverpool Hospital Brain Injury Rehabilitation Unit, Sydney. Country: Australia. Duration of follow‐up: 1 month following treatment. Dropouts: 1 dropout from intervention group before completing post‐test assessment. 1 further dropout in the wait‐list group after completing assessment at the post‐treatment phase for the treatment group but prior to completing wait‐list treatment. Funding: project grant from National Medical and Research Council of Australia. Comments: at baseline, SPRS scores were significantly different between the groups, hence, results to be interpreted with caution. Long term maintenance of treatment effects cannot be observed/compared due to wait‐list control design.
Risk of bias
Bias	Authors' judgement	Support for judgement
Random sequence generation (selection bias)	Unclear risk	Comment: unclear method of random sequence generation.
Allocation concealment (selection bias)	Low risk	Quote: "random allocation to treatment or wait‐list group was completed off‐site by an independent person unfamiliar with the individuals."
Blinding of participants and personnel (performance bias) All outcomes	High risk	Comment: no details provided in the report regarding blinding of participants and personnel. Self‐reported outcome (SPRS) likely to be influenced by lack of blinding of participants.
Blinding of outcome assessment (detection bias) Objective outcomes	Low risk	Comment: no details provided in the report regarding blinding of outcome assessors. Since the primary outcome was a self‐reported scale, lack of blinding of outcome assessment was unlikely to influence the outcome the study.
Incomplete outcome data (attrition bias) All outcomes	Low risk	Comment: 1 dropout in each arm. No reason for dropout provided. No significant differences in the pretest scores of the dropouts except in TASIT Part 1 scores where they performed poorer when compared with those who completed the treatments.
Selective reporting (reporting bias)	Low risk	Comment: all stated outcomes were reported.
Other bias	Low risk	No other bias detected.