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.
PROBLEMThe effectiveness of psychotherapy has been an issue of continuing research and 6 , 6 , 17. 18, 22, 2 6 ) in recent years. As C a r t~r i g h t (~) observed, the major argument of those who view psychotherapy as an ineffective technique has centered on the issue of spontaneous remission. This argument holds that because certain investigations have shown that a proportion of maladjusted individuals improve in a specified time period in the absence of formal psychotherapeutic intervention and because this proportion of "spontaneous" remissions is equal to or even greater than the mean reported proportion of successful cases in psychotherapy, therefore the latter could plausibly be classified as spontaneous also. Thus, this position holds, there is no ground for attributing special remedial effectiveness to psychotherapy. In addition to other bases, Cart,wright has taken exception to this conclusion on the grounds that it clearly implies that results derived using a single type of experimental design (matched-control design) are sufficient for resolving the issue in question.With Cartwright's position as background, the present paper considers the spontaneous remission argument in terms of quite a different set of evidence, that dealing with patient expectancies and the placebo effect in psychotherapy. Our basic contention, following this line of evidence, is that the remission of symptomatology heretofore termed "spontaneous" is, in fact, quite unspontaneous and a function of identifiable causative factors.
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