Aggression Replacement Training: Curriculum and Evaluation

Abstract

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.