. 2022 Mar 3;12:3544. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-07420-z

Table 4.

Recommendations for future studies.

Recommendations for…
Future studies in the field of socio-cognitive training	Social cognition is more than just ToM (future studies may focus on socio-cognitive domains such as emotion recognition training, social decision making, visual perspective training) Consideration of possible predictors (future studies should consider and assess possible sociodemographic and/or cultural predictors that may influence training performance) Assessment of transfer effects (future studies should assess transfer effects to assess a possible generalization of training effects) Assessment over the lifespan (future studies may also focus on socio-cognitive skills and training in middle-aged adults)
Study design and documentation in training studies	Preregistration (all future intervention studies should be registered prior to the start of data collection) Randomization (participants should be randomly assigned to conditions; randomization requires large sample sizes) Sampling (sample sizes should be large enough to observe effects of reasonable size reliably) Blinding (blinding should be ensured whenever possible for researchers and participants) Clear definition of constructs (future studies should clearly define socio-cognitive domains and subdomains, e.g. affective/cognitive ToM) Good control conditions (a baseline control condition, ideally an active control condition should be used as it is more critical for inferences about the potency of the intervention than a passive control group) Reliable outcome measure (outcome measures with known or measurable reliability should be used and reported)
Analysis, reporting and publication of training studies	Correction for multiple comparisons (corrections for multiple comparisons should be used to adjust the alpha level) Open data policy (data and analysis plans should be provided publicly) Single publication (duplicate publications should be avoided or described and explained in detail with reference to the original study)

Recommendations for…

Future studies in the field of socio-cognitive training

Social cognition is more than just ToM (future studies may focus on socio-cognitive domains such as emotion recognition training, social decision making, visual perspective training)

Consideration of possible predictors (future studies should consider and assess possible sociodemographic and/or cultural predictors that may influence training performance)

Assessment of transfer effects (future studies should assess transfer effects to assess a possible generalization of training effects)

Assessment over the lifespan (future studies may also focus on socio-cognitive skills and training in middle-aged adults)

Study design and documentation in training studies

Preregistration (all future intervention studies should be registered prior to the start of data collection)

Randomization (participants should be randomly assigned to conditions; randomization requires large sample sizes)

Sampling (sample sizes should be large enough to observe effects of reasonable size reliably)

Blinding (blinding should be ensured whenever possible for researchers and participants)

Clear definition of constructs (future studies should clearly define socio-cognitive domains and subdomains, e.g. affective/cognitive ToM)

Good control conditions (a baseline control condition, ideally an active control condition should be used as it is more critical for inferences about the potency of the intervention than a passive control group)

Reliable outcome measure (outcome measures with known or measurable reliability should be used and reported)

Analysis, reporting and publication of training studies

Correction for multiple comparisons (corrections for multiple comparisons should be used to adjust the alpha level)

Open data policy (data and analysis plans should be provided publicly)

Single publication (duplicate publications should be avoided or described and explained in detail with reference to the original study)

Please also refer to general reporting guidelines and recommendations of cognitive /socio-cognitive training studies, such as e.g.^59,60, from which we adopted the general recommendations for study design, documentation, analysis, reporting, and publication of training studies.