Arnold P. Goldstein

Aggression replacement training: curriculum and evaluation

Aggression Replacement Training (ART) is a multimodal intervention design to alter the behavior of chronically aggressive youth. It consists of skillstreaming, designed to teach a broad curriculum of prosocial behavior, anger control training, a method for empowering youth to modify their own anger responsiveness, and moral reasoning training, to help motivate youth to employ the skills learned via the other components. The authors present a series of efficacy evaluations, which combine to suggest that ART is an impactful intervention. With considerable reliability, it appears to promote skills acquisition and performance, improve anger control, decrease the frequency of acting-out behaviors, and increase the frequency of constructive, prosocial behaviors. Beyond institutional walls, its effects persist. In general, its potency appears to be sufficiently adequate that its continued implementation and evaluation with chronically aggressive youngsters is clearly warranted.

The Gang Intervention Handbook.

Nationally recognized professionals join Dr. Goldstein and Dr. Huff in this unparalleled presentation of gang intervention strategies and tactics. Covers psychological, contextual, and criminal justice interventionsThe book focuses on both preventive and rehabilitative approaches and special intervention parameters such as cultural sensitivity, public policy issues, and balancing the needs of gang youth with the needs of society.

Training Aggressive Adolescents in Prosocial Behavior.

The initial outcomes and current directions of a research and treatment program focusing upon Structured Learning Therapy (SLT) are the concerns of this paper. SLT is a psychoeducational approach used successfully in the past with psychiatric and other clients and is now designed to teach prosocial behaviors to aggressive adolescents. Evaluations of such training efforts to date have been largely positive. However, still more favorable skill development outcomes should follow from differential implementation of SLT in which trainee-trainer-treatment matches are prescriptively arrived at and in which major attention is devoted to transfer of training techniques designed to maximize real-life utilization of training gains. The present article describes SLT and its usage with aggressive adolescents, and details guidelines by which prescriptiveness and transfer enhancement may be implemented.

Aggression Replacement Training: A multimodal intervention for aggressive adolescents.

SUMMARY This article provides an overview of Aggression Replacement Training (ART), an empirically validated and theoretically grounded multimodal intervention designed to prevent and reduce aggression in adolescents. ART consists of three components: (1) skills streaming, designed to teach a broad range of social skills; (2) anger control training, a method for empowering youth to modify their own anger responsiveness; and (3) moral reasoning education, training to motivate youth to use skills acquired through the other two training components. Implementation issues are presented. Strategies to successfully transfer and maintain acquired skills, as well as enhance trainee motivation, are outlined. Efficacy studies suggest that ART is an effective program for aggressive adolescents in a wide range of treatment settings.

Refusal Skills: Learning to Be Positively Negative:

Many youth wishing to refuse drugs or alcohol offered to them are deficient in the interpersonal abilities which constitute such refusal skills. This article describes Skillstreaming, an interpersonal skill training approach of apparent effectiveness when used for such behavioral enhancement purposes. Presented are its constituent training procedures, specific skills content, and methods for promoting the transfer and maintenance of skill competence in real-world, refusal-relevant situations.

Structured Learning: A Psychoeducational Approach for Teaching Social Competencies.

This article describes the use of Structured Learning, a psychoeducational approach for teaching social competencies to adolescents and pre-adolescents. The youngsters who are likely to be trained through Structured Learning are generally categorized as aggressive, withdrawn, immature, or developmentally lagging. Research evidence evaluating the effectiveness of this approach is also discussed.

Anti-Social Behavior

Aim of this lesson To think about the term anti social behaviour. What sort of behaviour can be considered as anti social and what impact can this have on the people and places around us. Learning objective By the end of this lesson pupils should understand what is meant by the term anti social behaviour and what sort of behaviours can be included within its meaning. Pupils should also understand that there is not a clear distinction between antisocial behaviour and crime, as one can often be a precursor to the other.

Ecovandalism and Psychological Inquiry

This book has sought, in both broad sweep and fine detail, to examine the nature of vandalism and vandalism intervention in contemporary society. We have considered its frequency and costs, definitions and demographics, typologies and theories of causation, strategies and tactics of intervention, means of combining tactics into effective intervention programs, and guidelines for rigorously evaluating the effectiveness of such programs. Collectively, those several topics combine to almost, but not quite, complete the psychology-of-vandalism picture we seek to present. What remains to be addressed is the topic of ecovandalism.

Definitions and Demographics

In the fifth century a.D., a fierce Germanic tribe, the Vandals, plundered Gaul, North Africa, Rome, and other conquered territories. Their heavy destruction of buildings and works of art lent their name in perpetuity to the behaviors of concern herein. Perhaps then, which particular behavior could be called vandalistic was clear. That is certainly not the case now. Like many other behavior-descriptive terms (e. g., stress, anxiety, dependency, aggression), behaviors contemporaneously subsumed under the term vandalism are many and varied. So, too, its very definitions. In the present chapter I will seek to bring a beginning sense of order to what Christensen, Johnson, and Brookes (1992) correctly asserted has become a “hodgepodge concept,” Levy-Leboyer (1984) termed a “ragbag” of meanings, and Rubel (1980) called a “catch-all.”

Why Study Vandalism

A major part of my early preparation for the writing of this book involved a broad and deep literature search on the topic of vandalism. Several databases were searched, including education, psychology, criminology, environmental science, sociology, and more. These searches went back 20 years. The product of this energetic effort was curious. While the total number of relevant articles, books, dissertations, and commentaries was large, their appearance by year departed substantially from my initial expectations. As described later in this book, because the problem of vandalism seems to have grown and even accelerated over this 20-year span, I thought there would be a corresponding increase in writings about it. Examination of the collected references, however, revealed a steady buildup through the late 1960s and the 1970s that was not followed in the 1981–1983 period by a continued increase, or a leveling off, or even a steady decline. Instead, theoretical, research, and speculative writing about the nature of vandalism and its reduction virtually ceased in these several bodies of literature in the early 1980s!