Aggression Replacement Training: What It Is And Phases Of This Technique
There are different ways to address a case of aggressive behavior in children and aggression replacement training It is one of the best known.
Below we will break down the most important points of this technique to understand its foundations and understand where its effectiveness comes from. We will also see in what context it was developed and what is the way to apply it correctly to achieve success.
Aggression replacement training or ART, by its name in English (aggression replacement training) is a psychological technique aimed at intervention in cases of adolescents (mainly, but also adults or children) whose behaviors are usually violent. The creators of this program were American psychologists, Barry Glick and Arnold P. Goldstein.
To do this, they were based on parts of other existing models, with the aim of achieving a technique that brought together the strengths of all of them. For example, one of the characteristics it uses comes from none other than Jean Piaget, and is peer work, so that adolescents can learn from an equal, since studies show that they pay more attention when this is the case.
It is a cognitive-behavioral technique, as it seeks to generate changes in the subject’s thinking and behavior, with the aim of replacing aggressive behaviors with others that are adjusted to social interactions and thus cease the conflicts in which he was constantly involved.
Aggression replacement training is an especially popular program in the countries of North America, South America, and also in several European states, in addition to Australia. In some juvenile centers and even in penitentiary centers it is common to resort to this model to try to ensure that inmates experience improvement, reducing their violent behavior and thus achieving the reintegration that these institutions seek.
For example, in Washington, aggression replacement training was one of the programs chosen, along with three others, for use in projects associated with the community justice accountability law that was enacted in 1997, thanks to the evidence of improvement that the data demonstrated.
Although it is not the technique used mostly in all these centers, it is one of the main ones and little by little it is gaining more popularity, which is why professionals believe that it is a promising advance in order to ensure that people who suffer from of aggressive behaviors find the tools they need to replace said behaviors with others.
Parts of this psychological technique
Aggression replacement training is implemented through three very different phases. The objective is to learn a series of skills so that they can be used instead of the aggressive reactions that the person usually shows. The program is designed to be carried out over ten weeks, teaching a total of three one-hour sessions in each of them.
Let’s now see each of the three phases in detail.
1. Social skills training
The first phase of aggression replacement training has to do with teaching social skills. In this case, The authors Glick and Goldstein took part from Albert Bandura’s theory for their model. The point is that, by working on social skills, the aim is to modify the most behavioral part of people with an aggressive nature, especially adolescents.
Many of these people lack such social skills and therefore their tendency is to naturally resort to violence. Therefore, it seems logical to think that, if we provide them with these tools, their tendency toward violent behavior should be diminished.
The aggression replacement training social skills program contains many points for the subject to learn how to function in a variety of situations. For example, when making a complaint or criticism, to put yourself in another person’s shoes and understand the emotions that your neighbor is having and even understand the other person’s anger without losing your cool.
Also It will help you anticipate a dialogue that is expected to be tense for any reason., without needing to lose your temper and of course without ever becoming aggressive. He will learn not to give in to the pressure of his peer group. Likewise, he will acquire the ability to calmly assert his position when he receives an unjust accusation. Of course, you will also understand the importance of helping other people.
Learning about expressing your own feelings towards other people will be especially important. Finally, work will also be done so that the person learns to accept negative situations or failure.
Each session focuses on one of these social skills in particular and analyzes the thoughts and actions they include, teaching the adolescent who is participating in aggression replacement training how to act according to those teachings. To make learning more fluid, they are asked to think about past situations.
2. Anger control
The second phase of aggression replacement training is actually learning to manage anger. Therefore, it would be about adolescents learning to control the emotional part of aggressiveness. In this case, learning will consist, first of all, of eliminating the antisocial skills that the subject has been acquiring and then replacing them with other prosocial ones.
The goal is for young people to learn to deal with situations that previously made them angry, in a new way, in which they do not experience those sensations. To do this, the anger control chain is worked on. The chain begins with the triggering stimuli, which can come from the subject themselves or from outside. As a result of them, you can observe signs of the anger that is to come, such as physiological activation.
Once these signals are detected, the subject must be aware and try to reduce anger through three different mechanisms.: first, a series of deep breaths, then, count down and, finally, visualize scenarios that are pleasant for the person. It is about removing the focus of the stressful stimulus and taking it to a much more peaceful place.
The adolescent will continue to remind himself that he is capable of controlling and dominating himself. He will also think what would happen if he lost control. In addition, he will try to perform a prosocial skill instead of the antisocial one that he would have performed if he had not controlled the anger chain thanks to the aggression replacement training. Once the situation has passed, he will evaluate its development.
The last of the phases of aggression replacement training deals with moral reasoning, that is, about the cognitive part. Through this learning, it is intended that young people acquire a new moral perspective about their actions. To do this, we will fundamentally work on four thinking errors that generally lead to acquiring a dimension of morality that does not fit with reality.
The first of them is egocentric thinking. It has to do with all the ruminations of the type “everything bad happens to me”, “only good things happen to others”, “I am very unhappy”, “I have very bad luck”, etc.
The second thought is the one in which It is assumed that the worst option is the one that will always happendenoting great pessimism.
The third thinking error is the one that makes that the person blames others and therefore assume an external locus of control. The fault will always lie with others, so, in contrast, he will always be a victim of the actions of others and society, which push him to act that way, because they give him no other alternative.
Finally, we would find erroneous labeling or minimization, which serves the individual to justify his actions. For example, stealing or exercising violence against others, claiming that many people also do it.
This phase of aggression replacement training is fundamentally formed by the knowledge that Lawrence Kohlberg captured in his work about the stages of moral development, another example of the compilation work that the creators of this technique carried out, to unify different theories that they allowed us to create an effective system to control aggressiveness, especially during adolescence.
