An Assessment Instrument for Anger Management in Correctional Settings: The Angry Cognitions Scale-Prison Form

Abstract As the rates of both violent crime and prison violence continue to rise, anger management programs have become a common treatment recommendation for prisoners. Several psychology treatment programs have incorporated anger management as core curricula, and many supervisory and probation officers mandate anger management as a post release requirement for probationers. Assessment tools that provide direction in treatment planning and therapeutic will surely be very helpful. The Angry Cognitions Scale (ACS) (Martin and Dahlen in J Ration Emot Cogn Behav Therapy 25:155–173, 2007) was formulated to assess the cognitive antecedents to anger: overgeneralizing, inflammatory labeling, demandingness, catastrophic evaluation, and misattributing causation. Evaluation of adaptive anger was also included. A limitation of that study is its lack of generalization to populations beyond college students and the authors recommended rewriting the scenarios to fit specific clinical populations. Researchers have noticed that prisoners may exhibit unique responses to anger provocations due to their conditions of confinement, potential consequences for acts of violence, and cultural norms of the prison environment (Wydo in Measuring anger in a prison population using the Anger Disorders Scale and the Personality Assessment Inventory, 2003). In the current study, the original scenarios from the Angry Cognitions Scale were reworded or reconstructed to replicate common anger...
Source: Journal of Rational-Emotive and Cognitive-Behavior Therapy - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research