Social skills training as a treatment for aggressive children and adolescents: a developmental–clinical integration
Section snippets
Intervention approaches
The more than 50 treatment studies reviewed are grouped according to developmental level and summarized in Table 1, Table 2, Table 3. For review purposes, the intervention studies are grouped broadly and discussed as follows: (1) SST, (2) cognitive–behavioral skills training, and (3) multicomponent cognitive–behavioral skills training.
Developmental findings and clinical implications
We now turn to our review of key developmental findings and their clinical implications. Given our sense of the limited nature of past integration attempts, we decided to weight this review more toward fundamental developmental factors, which include age, gender, race, and the identification of intervention samples. Also included are two areas of developmental inquiry, social cognition and peer group influences, selected on the basis of their potential clinical impact.
Summary and conclusions
The SST literature clearly offers an impressive array of effective treatments for aggressive children and adolescents. As evidenced in this review, these interventions are not only capable of ameliorating aggression but building prosocial skill repertoires as well. Efforts to incorporate developmental findings and principles within this literature, however, have fallen woefully short. Indeed, our review revealed that even the most fundamental developmental considerations were frequently
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