Effects of Talking About Situations Eliciting Aggression: A Middle-School Student With Pervasive Developmental Disorders

Abstract

The present study examined effects of having a middle-school (7th grade) student who had been diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorders talk about events or situations in which he had engaged in aggressive behavior. The aggressive behavior occurred frequently at school. The boy was asked to talk about events or situations in which he had engaged in aggressive behavior at school, based on the 3-tern contingency and role-playing, and to estimate, in clinic settings, how excited he felt, using a scale from 1 to 4, with 4 being very angry. The intervention facilitated coping skills that he had used in events or situations in which he had not engaged in aggressive behavior; the purpose of the session was checked when he resisted talking about his behavior. The results suggest that when he talked in detail about those events and situations in which he had engaged in aggressive behavior and about the coping skills that might manage his anger, his discrimination of his level of excitement increased. Implications and limitations of this procedure are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)