A Comparative Study of Acceptance/ Commitment Training and Social Skills Training on Aggression Signs in Adolescents

Adolescence is the period between childhood and adulthood. Adolescents are threatened by high risk behaviors more than children or adults. Aggression is an effective deterrent factor on adolescents’ health. Researchers have found aggression predicts the adaptability of social and psychological difficulties. Psychologists believe that aggression disorder is the source of many behavioral and psychological difficulties in adolescents and quality of person’s life can be affected by regression. Achieving social skills are considered as a major contributor to social development, social relation formation, and social adaptability even mental health protection. On the other hand, recently, Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) is a therapeutic model that reduces aggressive signs in many non-adaptability behaviors. Furthermore, this treatment reduces the experimental avoiding and increases the psychological flexibility. Thus, the aim of this research was to compare the effect of social skills training and acceptance and commitment training on aggression signs in adolescents. This study employed a two group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design. The study population consisted of all female adolescents studying at Noshahr in the year of 2016. For this study, 75 adolescents with aggression signs were selected by random sampling and were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups (25 people in the experimental group based on social skills training, 25 people in the experimental group based on acceptance and commitment training and 25 people in the control group).  The research instrument was Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire (BPAQ) which was completed at the beginning of sessions, end of sessions and after 3 months (follow-up level) by the participants.  The training courses were 10 sessions for each of two experimental groups, while the control group did not receive any training.  Repeated Measures Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and post hoc tests were used to test the research hypotheses. Also the significant level for hypothesis test was considered 0.05. Repeated Measures Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) findings showed that there is a significant difference between the control and training groups (p<0.001). No significant difference was found between the two experimental groups, namely, social skills training and acceptance/commitment. Both social skills training and acceptance and commitment training reduce aggression signs in adolescents so these two treatment models help adolescents avoid non-adaptability and improve the individual, family and academic performance of adolescents suffering from aggression. Also this ability is transferrable to a variety of social situations.