The emotional experience of anger and its behavioral correlates, including aggressive behavior, have significant social, personal, and medical costs. The core of all efficacious psychosocial treatments for anger and aggression involves exposure to provocative stimuli, suggesting that exposure is a necessary condition of treatment. However, almost no research has been conducted to examine whether exposure itself is a sufficient condition for reducing anger and aggression. If exposure alone can be shown to reduce anger and aggression, this would facilitate development of more parsimonious yet effective psychosocial treatments. The proposed project involves a controlled, comparative trial of an individually-administered 10-session exposure-based treatment for the reduction of anger and aggressive behavior. Approximately 180 (treatment completers) generally angry and aggressive individuals (i.e., those who score in the upper quartile on a measure of trait anger and report at least one episode of impulsive aggression in the past year) will be randomly assigned to Exposure Therapy (ET; a combination of imaginal and in vivo exposure to anger arousing stimuli), Cognitive Relaxation Coping Skills (CRCS; an empirically supported psychological treatment for dysfunctional anger), or a no treatment wait list. It is predicted that ET will result in clinically meaningful reductions in anger and aggression relative to no treatment (i.e., the absolute efficacy of ET will be tested to determine whether this treatment has merit) and will be comparable to CRCS (i.e., the relative efficacy of ET to CRCS will be tested to determine if ET represents a viable alterative to an established psychosocial treatment). Multiple outcome measures, including both self-report and key informant report, will be administered at pre-treatment, post-treatment, and 6-month follow-up intervals. ? ? ?
| Moore, Michael; Dahlen, Eric R (2008) Forgiveness and consideration of future consequences in aggressive driving. Accid Anal Prev 40:1661-6 |
