Current Status of the Anger Avoidance Model: Recent Empirical Findings and Treatment Considerations

Abstract

The Anger Avoidance Model (AAM), a contemporary theoretical model for understanding the relationship between anger and violence, was presented first in 2008, and since, empirical research has been mostly supportive of its tenets. The AAM essentially purports that individuals prone to violent behaviour typically manifest an aversive developmental history; early maladaptive schemas, which serve as a lens through which one interprets life experience; and poorly developed emotion regulation skills. Such deficits in emotion regulation result in poor tolerance of emotions such as anger, and in turn frequently lead to efforts to avoid or escape the experience of negative emotion, particularly anger, with violent behaviour often the consequence. Based on supported principles within the AAM, contextual anger regulation therapy (CART) was developed specifically to treat clients exhibiting such anger-related violent behaviour. The current article provides a needed update on recent empirical findings that support the AAM, and subsequently discusses the relationship between the AAM and CART, an integrated acceptance-based behavioural intervention that the AAM directly generated.

Contextualist Perspectives in the Treatment of Antisocial Behaviors and Offending: A Comparative Review of FAP, ACT, DBT, and MDT

“…The consequence of behaving in accordance with such verbal contexts is psychological inflexibility (Chawla & Ostafin, 2007;Hayes et al, 2006). There is enough evidence to support the involvement of generalized experiential avoidance and behavioral inflexibility in antisocial behaviors (see Amrod & Hayes, 2014;Birkley & Eckhardt, 2015;Eifert et al, 2006;Moore, 2016;Santanello et al, 2017;Shorey et al, 2014;Visdómine, 2014;Yavuz et al, 2016). Hayes et al (1999) establish six fundamental therapeutic strategies to gain psychological flexibility and diminish experiential avoidance: (a) promoting a creative hopelessness by suggesting the uselessness of the clients' attempts to control their suffering, (b) making clients aware of their own controlling agendas, (c) practicing the defusion and deliteralization of language, (d) taking a perspective of the self as context versus the psychological contents, (e) clarifying values, and (f) committing to act in a valued direction.…”

Editor Note: Journal of Forensic Psychology (Volume 1 Issue 2)

“…Currently anger avoidance model (AAM) proposed in 2008, is being used for understanding the relation between anger and violence. In the research article, Moore [2] presented updates on the recent empirical findings that support AAM, and subsequently discussed the relationship between contextual anger regulation therapies (CART).…”