PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERVENTIONS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMMUNICATION SKILLS: TRENDS, CHALLENGES AND PRACTICAL RESULTS (REVIEW OF CURRENT RESEARCH)

Relevance.In recent years, communicative competence in the helping professions has increasingly become a matter of concern, as interpersonal communication fundamentally determines the quality of care, psychosocial support, and social services.Communication is now recognized as a multifaceted psychological process that includes empathy, listening, emotional regulation, trust, and partnershipbuilding, rather than merely the relay of information.Developments in practice, organisation, and ethics have been accompanied by a widening communication workload: long-term conditions, mental health difficulties, crisis situations, and the digitalisation of encounters all place additional demands on high-quality communication across different contexts.Concurrently, the spread of disparate training programmes across settings and disparities in access to well-developed communication training have led to fragmentation and inequities in outcomes among professionals and populations.The aim of this article is to compile and summarise the latest evidence on psychological interventions for the development of communication competence across different target groups, to examine their effectiveness and limitations, to explore the potential contribution of emerging technologies (such as artificial intelligence), and to outline trends and challenges that should be considered in future research and practice.Discussion.The review reveals that, while communication-based interventions can have positive effects across populations and contexts, results are heterogeneous due to differences in training intensity, content, and alignment with participants' socialcognitive skills and developmental level.More traditional interventions that integrate the technical aspects of communication with work on attitudes, affect within teams, emotional regulation, and psychological safety appear more robust than those that are exclusively behaviourally oriented; however, many have been evaluated using nonstandardised measures, limiting comparison and evidence synthesis.New virtual patients, simulation platforms, conversational agents, and AI-enhanced feedback systems open up new possibilities for deliberate practice and individualised guidance, but they also raise unresolved pedagogical, methodological, and ethical questions concerning transfer to real-life communication contexts, data protection, and the perceived "liveliness" of interaction.Findings from mental health, oncology, nursing, Журнал «Перспективи та інновації науки» № 12(58) 2025 3158 and primary care suggest that increased communicative competence is associated with improved clinical and behavioural outcomes in patients, as well as lower levels of moral distress and higher levels of resilience and psychological well-being among professionals.At the organisational level, communication training helps to create psychological safety, more effective team dynamics, and better working climates, while structural inequities in access to such programmes risk exacerbating existing disparities in quality of care and opportunities for career development.Conclusion.In sum, these results suggest that strategically designed, evidence-based communication trainingpotentially supplemented with both human-delivered and technologysupported interventionsrepresents an important route by which patient outcomes can be optimised, professionals' mental well-being protected, and organisational effectiveness strengthened.