Introduction to the Special Issue: Addressing youth anger and aggression in school settings

Abstract

School psychologists, like other mental health professionals working within school settings, areoften called upon to diagnose and treat serious emotional and behavioral disorders in youth. Althoughtraditional categories of childhood psychopathology such as depression, anxiety, and disruptive be-havior disorders have received the bulk of research and clinical attention, an emerging interest amongpractitioners is in the area of children’s anger-related problems. Despite an overall lack of consen-sus with regard to defining and operationalizing anger and related constructs such as hostility andaggression (Smith & Furlong, 1994), a growing body of literature is documenting the role of angerin a wide range of social, academic, occupational, and health-related outcomes. Clear linkages havebeen established, for example, between chronically high levels of anger and problem behavior atschool (Smith, Furlong, Bates, & Laughlin, 1998), poor academic performance (Heavy, Adelman,Nelson, & Smith, 1989; Hinshaw, 1992), peer rejection (Dodge, 1993), and psychosomatic com-plaints (Friedman, 1991). Additionally, anger is an associated feature of numerous externalizing andinternalizing disorders in children including oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, atten-tion deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and depressive and anxiety-based disorders (Eckhardt & Deffen-bacher, 1995).The purpose of this special issue of Psychology in the Schoolsis to provide school psycholo-gists with information pertinent to the prevalence, development, diagnosis, and treatment of anger-related problems within school settings. School psychologists are interested in anger-related prob-lems among youth from at least four major foci. The first pertains to factors contributing to theexperience of anger and hostility and management of angry feelings. Contemporary research has em-phasized multiple causal factors including biological influences, family variables, the role of schooland peers, and cultural, social, and economic forces. The article by DeBaryshe and Fryxell looks atfamily and peer process variables that are influential in the development of chronically high levelsof anger and aggression. Specifically, the article examines communication patterns and coercive fam-ily processes as well as social-cognitive variables that characterize angry, aggressive youth. The ar-ticle by Morrison, Robertson, and Harding examines the critical role of social support including per-ceived parental supervision in fostering resiliency among elementary-age students from a Latinocommunity who were characterized as aggressive on the basis of teacher ratings.Of additional interest to school psychologists is the role of anger in disruptive and antisocialbehavior within school settings. Numerous researchers have commented on the stability of aggres-sion over time and across situations. Childhood aggression has been shown to be highly predictiveof later aggressive, antisocial behavior (Farrington et al., 1990; Olweus, 1984; Trembley et al., 1992).Additionally, anger and hostility appear to be important factors in the occurrence of violence inschools (Furlong, Chung, Bates, & Morrison, 1995). The article by Kingery, Coggeshall, and Alfordreviews findings from three recent national surveys pertaining to school and community violenceamong adolescents. Not surprisingly, incidents of school violence appear to be closely linked to in-volvement with violence in the broader community, both as perpetrator and victim. This article also