American Journal of Community Psychology, VoL 5, No. 3, 1977

A Stress Inoculation Approach to Anger Management in the Training of Law Enforcement

Officers 1

Raymond W. Novaco 2 University of California, Irvine

Consultation with law enforcement personnel in the area of conflict-management has typically been concerned with interpersonal rather than intrapersonal conflier. An approach to anger management that is based on cognitive self-control techniques is described as it has been used in the training of police officers. The approach follows a procedure called "stress inoculation" that has been applied to anxiety and pain (Meichenbaum, 1975). Data are presented on the anger experiences of policemen, and suggestions are offered for the selection of police candidates regarding their proneness for provocation.

Conflict management occupies a considerable part of police work, and there has been a surge in the popularity of training law enforcement personnel as effective conflict management or crisis intervention agents (Bard, 1969, 1971; Driscoll, Meyer, & Schanie, 1973; Leibman & Schwartz, 1973; Monahan, 1975; Zacker & Bard, 1973). This training has focused predominantly on the management of conflict external to the police officer. That is, training has centered on thirdparty intervention in citizen disputes such that police personnel learn how to mediate and defuse conflict situations in which the anger of others is in need of regulation. However, "Despite the pervasiveness of interpersonal conflict, the most difficult and probably the most important conflicts for police officers are intrapersonal" (Smith & Stotland, 1973, p. 13). The present paper describes an approach to police training which is directed at one form of inner conflict, namely, the experience of anger and at techniques for its self-controlled regulation. 1 T h e author wishes to express his appreciation to J o h n M o n a h a n and David Dooley for their valuable c o m m e n t s on the manuscript. : All correspondence should be sent to Dr. R. W. Novaco, Program in Social Ecology, University of California, Irvine, California 92717. 327 This journal is c o p y r i g h t e d by Plenum. Each article is available for $7.50 f r o m Plenum Publishing C o r p o r a t i o n , 227 West 17th Street, N e w Y o r k , N.Y. 10011.

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While training in anger-management skills is relevant to a variety of populations (e.g., child abusers, hypertensives, and assaultive juveniles), it is particularly relevant to law enforcement officers. Not only are they charged by society with the handling of civil disturbances that typically have anger as a prominent feature, but the police are often the target of hostile abuse from citizens. As the most visible extension of the government or the "establishment," they must often absorb citizen frustration and hostility. While crisis intervention skills enable an officer to respond to the anger of others toward others, there is a need to assist the officer in mitigating his own anger and directing his behavior toward the constructive resolution of provocative exchanges. Effective anger management has important implications not only for job efficiency and better community relations but also for the personal safety of patrol officers. Toch (1969) has shown that violent exchanges between police and assaultive criminals are often a function of acts of antagonism on the part of the police, and he has implemented interventions at the organizational level to reduce the incidence of violent exchanges (Toch, 1975). Procedures for the selfregulation of anger that prevent the escalation of aggressive sequences have been developed by Novaco (1975). These procedures, developed for the clinical treatment of persons with chronic anger control problems, can with appropriate modification be extended to other populations. The law enforcement officer has a uniquely difficult status with regard to anger control. The police are expected to handle provocation with finesse and composure. Should the officer fail in diplomacy or psychological dexterity he will run the risk of public recrimination. In fact, citizen complaints to supervisory personnel rank high in the hierarchy of anger elicitors for the line officer. A police officer's work responsibilities not only thrust him into situations having a high potential for antagonism, but he is also expected to behave in an objective and professional manner and thus is significantly curtailed in the freedom of expression granted to other persons. In an effort to improve the professional status of his department, the police commissioner of Baltimore once issued a set of commands, one of which stated, "Regardless of the situation there is no excuse for an officer to become irritated or lose his temper while on duty" (Edwards, 1968, p. 42). The anger-arousing potential of the behavior settings in which the police officer performs is exacerbated by role frustrations in which the officer is caught between the tasks of law enforcement and community service which have differential merit. "Actually, the police are expected to do all those things and become all things to all people, at once the confessor and the inquisitor, the friend of all yet the armed nemesis of some" (Garmire, 1972, p. 2). The frustration with community service roles that alienates the police officer from his constituency is noted by Rubin (1972). He states that this frustration is derived from the absence of rewards within the system for good performance as a peacekeeper, the lack of gratitude by citizens for community service interven-

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tions, the professional insecurity generated by the demands of a community service call, and the fact that these calls seldom end with a sense of closure or accomplishment. The unfortunate result may be that the officer becomes angry with his constituency, and these sentiments are reinforced by peers who have shared these dissatisfying experiences.

THE DISPOSITION FOR ANGER AMONG POLICE

A regnant criticism of police behavior has been the abuse of power. It has been asserted that aggressive behavior by police has been a major cause of collective violence and riot casualties (Kerner Commission, 1968; Marx, 1970). In an unsympathetic analysis of police personnel, Stark (1972) characterizes the police as an unusual subculture that is predisposed to conflict and anger as a result of prejudice, hostility, and fear. Based on the violent confrontations during the civil disturbances of the late 1960s, Stark's portrayal of the policeman's character is largely unfavorable. He does, however, recognizes that being charged with imposing the will of society's power structure upon disenfranchised groups is a predicament that is conducive to hostility. Noting that the police are constrained behaviorally in tense situations, Stark suggests that suppressed dayto-day anger accumulates over time and results in brutal behavior during demonstrations or riots where customary controls are weakened or suspended. Unfortunately, there is little experimental evidence which can be brought to bear on this particular proposition with the exception of research on Megargee's (1966; 1973) overcontrolled personality type whose instigation to aggression is seen as accumulating through temporal summation. Anger arousal is not an invariable precursor of aggression. In leading theories of aggression, anger is assigned response-energizing functions (Berkowitz, 1974), response-activity properties (Bandura, 1973), or a response-motivating role (Feshbach, 1971). However, in each of these formulations, anger is not seen as a necessary condition for the occurrence of aggressive behavior. Aggression is determined by many factors, such as its response consequences, modeling influences, and various forms of stimulus control including cognitive processes. Nevertheless, the arousal of anger is a powerful determinant of aggressive behavior, particularly when such behavior is organizationally sanctioned. Given the provocative circumstances with which police officers must contend and society's concern with the abuse of power, the regulation of anger has a special significance. To what extent are police officers provocation-prone? To examine this question, two samples of 31 policemen each were administered an inventory to assess their reactions to situations of provocation. The inventory consists of 80 situational descriptions of provocation incidents for which respondents rate their anger on a 5-point scale and is a revised form of the instrument reported in Novaco (1975). The first sample consisted of officers attending in-service train-

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ing courses at the Center for Criminal Justice Training at Indiana University. These officers had a mean age of 29.9 years and an average of 5.5 years of experience. The second sample consisted of experienced officers (?7 = 3.9 years) applying for patrolman positions in the city of Irvine, California. This group was asked for their cooperation in obtaining research data and was assured that their responses on the inventory would not be used in the selection process. Response validity for this second sample was checked by administration of the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability scale. Crowne and Marlowe (1960) reported a mean of 13.72 and standard deviation of 5.75 for this scale. Using these norms, police respondents whose scores were greater than 2 SD were eliminated. The resultant sample mean and standard deviation were 17.55 and 5.13, respectively. The correlation of the social desirability scores with the total score on the anger inventory was -.389. This relationship is consistent with the findings of Corm and Crowne (1964) and Novaco (1975) which have shown need for approval as measured by the social desirability scale to be inversely related to the arousal of anger. However, the magnitude of the correlation for the police sample does not call into question the validity of the anger scores. The maximum score on the inventory is 400. When examined for internal consistency, the scale has been found to be highly reliable across various subject populations. For the combined police samples reported here, the reliability coefficient (alpha) was r = .969. Descriptive statistics for the total anger score of the police groups are contained in Table I. Statistics for undergraduate males recruited from a Social Sciences subject pool at the University of California, Irvine, and for a clinical sample of outpatients having chronic anger problems are also shown for comparison. The latter group were participants in treatment research at Indiana University (Novaco, 1975) and consisted of graduate and undergraduate students, university staff, office workers, and residents of the local community. While the police groups do differ significantly from the clinical sample, t (63) = 4.31 and 6.79, p < .001, they do not differ significantly in total score from the undergraduate hales. Thus, the police officers cannot be characterized as being prone to provocation. Their total anger responses are significantly less than persons identified as having anger-control problems and are not significantly different from a sample of normal college males.

Table I. Anger Inventory Statistics for Police, Undergraduate, and Clinical Samples

Mean Sigma n

Police sample 1

Pofice sample2

237.55 53.81 31

230.41 31.11 31

Undergraduate Chronic-anger males clients 241.47 44.26 153

287.01 36.07 34

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Table II. Anger Score Means and Standard Deviations for Undergraduate and Police Samples for Three Provocation Categories Provocation category

Undergraduates M SD

Police sample 1 M SD

Police sample2

M SD

Verbal abusea

Physicalabuse

Social injusticeb

19.16 5.18 17.84 6.33 16.77 4.41

23.50 4.64 23.90 5.11 22.48 4.00

22.69 5.38 20.19 4.81 23.74 4.40

a Difference is significant between undergraduate and combined police samples (p < .02). bDifference is significant between police samples (p < .004) and between undergraduates and police sample 1 (p < .02). Although the police and undergraduate groups do not differ in total anger score, they do differ in their response to particular situations of provocation represented by the various items. Three forms of provocation pertinent to police performance were selected for comparison with the undergraduate sample: verbal abuse, physical abuse, and social injustice. The verbal abuse situations consist of name-calling, derogation, cursing, and mockery. Physical abuse items entail instances of shoving, spitting, punching, competitive roughness, and linebucking. The social injustice situations consist of prejudicial and inequitable acts done to others, violations of the rights of others, and explorative practices. There are seven inventory items in each of these categories which were summed to composite category indices. The means and standard deviations for the police and undergraduate groups are presented in Table II. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was performed on these data using the provocation categories as dependent variables in the comparison of the police and undergraduate groups. This analysis assumes equal variances for these groups across the dependent variable indices, and a test of that assumption found no significant differences. The MANOVA results approached significance (multivariate F (3,211) = 2.18, p = .092). Undergraduates obtained higher anger scores than police for verbal abuse as the univariate analysis for this category is significant, F (1,213) = 5.52, p < .02. There were no significant differences between the undergraduate and combined police groups for the physical abuse or the social injustice items, but the undergraduates report greater anger (t (182) = 2.40, p = .018) than police sample 1 for social injustices. The results indicate that police officers have no greater disposition for anger than do undergraduate males, and in situations of verbal abuse they are less prone to being provoked.

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Group differences were also obtained in comparing the police samples. The MANOVA results were significant (multivariate F (3,58) = 5.10, p < .003), and the univariate tests found a significant group difference in anger reaction to the social injustice situations, F (1,60) = 9.19, p < .004, but not for verbal or physical abuse. As can be seen in Table II, the sample 1 officers reported slightly greater anger for verbal and physical abuse than did sample 2, but the sample 2 officers are significantly higher in their anger responses to situations of social injustice. Years of experience was also differentially associated with total anger score for the police groups. There was no significant relationship between these variables for sample 2, but for sample 1 there was an appreciable correlation of years of experience with total anger score (r = - . 4 2 6 , p < .02). Thus the degree of anger experience was inversely related to time on the job. This was not a function of years of age which only had a small correlation with anger score (r = -.276). For the combined police samples, there were 14 items that correlated above .65 with total anger score. The item most predictive of total score is "Someone sticking their nose into an argument between you and someone else" (r = .792). This is an interesting finding in light of the circumstances that sometimes prevail when officers question suspects on the street. Being thrust into a strained exchange with a motorist that becomes punctuated by harassing interruptions from bystanders is a potentially volatile situation. In point of fact, the Watts riot of 1965 "began" with such a situation. An officer's proneness to provocation in circumstances of this sort should be an important criteria for his or her suitability for law enforcement roles. Mills (1973) describes roleplaying situations consisting of these above dimensions that he has used in the selection of officer candidates. Examination of those items for which the police officers give the highest anger responses and of those eliciting the lowest anger scores further illustrates the differential response of police to physical and verbal provocation. As might be expected, the officers score highest on items having physical content: "Getting punched in the mouth" (X = 4.54), "Someone spits at you" (X = 4.19), "Seeing someone bully another person who is physically smaller than he is" (X = 3.92). However, among the lowest anger situations are those entailing verbal provoca. tion: "Someone making fun of the clothes you are wearing" (X = 1.98), "Being joked about or teased" (X = 1.98), "Being told to go to hell" (X = 2.12), "In the midst of an argument, someone calls you a 'stupid jerk'" (X = 2.24), each of which is significantly lower in anger (p < .05) than the responses of undergraduates. Although they react strongly with anger to physical confrontation, the officers are capable of coping with verbal abuse. This supports statements that the author has occasionally heard from policemen, e.g., "I don't care what he calls me, just as long as he doesn't put his hands on me." Once, in a role-play situation during an anger-management workshop, an officer remarked, "I was

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doing all right until he grabbed my uniform." Thus, while their anger threshold is comparatively high with respect to insults, the self-regulation of anger with respect to physical threat deserves special attention. These self-report data indicate that police officers are not extreme in their reactions to provocation, as overgeneralizations about police behavior might induce one to believe. That is, they do not process an abnormal disposition for anger, and the present subjects are significantly less reactive to verbal provocation than are college males. Furthermore, generalizations across police groups are to be made with caution, as significant differences were obtained between police samples. As previously discussed, anger is not uniformly related to aggression, so it is conceivable that provocative circumstances might elicit aggression from police without anger arousal. It would be fruitful for future investigations to examine police anger and aggression in terms of the frequency and kinds of provocation incidents to which officers are exposed, as well as the behavioral tasks with which they are beset in those situations. In the author's view, anger and aggression are problems for police officers not because of a personality proneness but due to a host of other factors, such as the kind and number of occasions in which their coping abilities are tested, the difficult tasks that their social roles prescribe, and the scrutiny to which their behavior is subjected. It is with these factors in mind that the intervention procedure described below has been implemented. However, the condoning of aggression by implicit organizational and occupational standards must not be overlooked. It is often in response to the thrust of such imperatives that the policeman swings his club (Neiderhoffer, 1967).

ANGER-MANAGEMENT TRAINING "Policemen who are prone to provocative aggressive actions must be taught how to cope more constructively with potentially dangerous situations" (Bandura, 1973, p. 260). Although anger arousal commonly has useful interpersonal functions, its occurrence for the police officer is less adaptive or socially valued. Danish and Brodsky (1970) presented a method to sensitize policemen to aggressive feelings and issues of self-control which consisted of having subjects react to stimulus f'rims and then review their reactions. While such techniques have considerable merit, a more comprehensive approach to training will be presented here. The approach to be described follows a procedure called stress inoculation that has been applied to anxiety and pain (Meichenbaum, 1975; Meichenbaum & Cameron, 1972; Meichenbaum, Turk, & Burstein, 1975). As the name suggests, the procedure entails the provision of skills that enable the person to cope with a stress situation. Analogous to a medical inoculation, the person's

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resistance is enhanced by a regulated exposure to stress stimuli such that the person's defenses are aroused but not overwhelmed. Meichenbaumet al. (1975) review the use of this procedure as applied to anxiety and pain and present it as having three basic stages: (1) an educational phase which provides a conceptual framework for the subject to understand his response to stress, (2) a rehearsal phase which provides cognitive and behavioral coping techniques, and (3) an application phase which gives the person the opportunity to become proficient in coping skills through practice under regulated stress conditions. The presentation below sets forth the application of this approach as it relates to anger in the training of police officers. It is an approach which the author has used in giving workshops to law enforcement personnel. The steps of the procedure are: (a) cognitive preparation, regarding the functions and determinants of anger, the properties of aggressive sequences, and the importance of cognitive factors; (b) skill acquisition and rehearsal, whereby participants discover and review coping processes through small group exercises; and (c) application and practice of coping techniques during a graduated series of role-play provocations. The components of the approach are presented in Table III and will be described below. Cognitive Preparation. Several theorists have emphasized the centrality of cognitive processes to the experience of stress and emotional arousal (Averill, 1973; Glass & Singer, 1972; Lazarus, 1966, 1967; Sells, 1970). Lazarus in particular has argued that response patterns, such as attack, are determined by particular cognitive appraisals of threat which interact with the individual's psychological structure and the stimulus configuration. Even in situations as severe as military combat, cognitive structuring of the stress circumstances has been identified as the most efficient factor in achieving adaptation (Rado, 1943; Bourne, 1969, 1970). The beneficial effect of cognitive preparation for impeding stress has been demonstrated by studies of hospitalized patients with regard to surgical trauma (Andrew, 1970; Cassell, 1965; Egbert, Battit, Welch, & Bartlett, 1964;

Table III. Procedural Components of Anger Management Training for Police Officers a. Cognitivepreparation 1. Problems associated with anger and aggression 2. Functions and determinants of anger arousal 3. Provocation sequence components

b. Skill acquisition 1. Small group problem-solvingand discussion 2. Cognitiveinterventions for anger regulation 3. Behavioralstrategies in provocation management

c. Application practice 1. Role-play enactments of provocation situations 2. Corrective and supportive feedback from coparticipants 3. Video tape replays and analysis

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Janis, 1958). These studies have shown that cognitive interventions for the distress of surgery have led to better adjustment during surgery, shorter time to discharge, and reduction in the use of medication, although in the case of Andrew (1970) the effect varied as a function of personality attributes (repression-sensitization). Most recently, Langer, Janis, and Wolfer (1975)demonstrated that a cognitive intervention of reappraisal, calming self-talk, and selective attention effectively reduced both pre- and postoperative stress. The cognitive preparation component also bears similarity to Bloom's (1971) "anticipatory guidance" whereby the target group is prepared for impending crises and given intellectual resources for understanding their reactions to stress. In the cognitive preparation phase, the process of adaptation to aversive events is facilitated by fostering two types of cognitive control distinguished by Averill (1973), these being information-gain and appraisal. The anger-management strategy is based on the conviction that anger arousal is to a significant extent determined by cognitive factors (i.e., one's construction of a situation, attributions of intent, justifications, and self-statements) and is directed toward the achievement of competence in cognitive selfcontrol skills. There is a burgeoning literature on the application of self-control techniques to clinical problems (Mahoney, 1974; Mahoney & Thoresen, 1974; Meichenbaum, 1974). These techniques which aim to enhance a person's ability to regulate his own behavior are dependent upon the individual's knowledge of the internal and environmental factors that affect his behavior. This requires that the person become a systematic observer of behavior settings as well as his thoughts, feelings, and actions. Furthermore, the person must also acquire a conceptual system for organizing his observations. To meet these objectives, the initial phase of the training procedure provides a conceptual framework for understanding the determinants and func. tions of anger as a response to provocation. This is accomplished by introducing the officers to a general model of anger functions (Novaco, 1976) and then to the specific application of that model to police experience. The model entails a simple typology of provocation events, the specification of functions that anger serves in affecting behavior, behavioral outcomes of arousal, and the consequences to the self and others which can escalate or reinstate the provocation sequence. Each of these components is presented with its substance composed of material specific to police experience. For example, the model specifies five basic types of provocation: annoyances, e.g., "spilling coffee on your uniform . . . . a drunk vomits in the back seat of your cruiser"; frustrations, e.g., "a citizen refuses to give you assistance," "supervisor tells you to rewrite a report"; ego threats, e.g., "not being respected as a professional," "you walk into a bar and someone says 'Here Comes super pig'"; assaults, e.g., "a suspect you are transporting spits at you through the screen," "the person you are bringing into custody pushes back"; and inequity, e.g., "getting a day's suspension for damage to a unit that was unavoidable," "unreasonable demands by

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citizens of law enforcement personnel." Participants are then encouraged to respond with their own ideas of events that fit the scheme. The second part of the educational phase presents a perspective of anger arousal incidents which views these experiences in terms of a sequence of interrelated events. Research by Raush (1965) on social behavior as interaction sequences has shown that the proportion of hostile behavior received is closely related to the amount of hostile behavior emitted. The operant analysis of children's aggressive behavior by Patterson, Littman, and Bricker (1967) also demonstrated the powerful effects of sequential factors. This research provides experimental support for Toch's (1969) analysis of police-suspect encounters. Provocation sequences are here viewed as having several components: (a) setting events, (b) cognitive determinants, (c) situational cues, (d) modes of response, and (e) consequences of the encounter. The provocation experience can be seen as a cumulative cluster of events which trigger anger. Each succeeding event contributes to an escalation of the episode until one party resigns his needs or copes constructively, or when sufficient coercive power is brought to bear on the antagonist resulting in his capitulation. Setting events are those circumstances which set the tempo for how an officer will be disposed to perform. They are experiences which prime an officer's reactions, such as statements from the watch commander before going on duty. For example, a patrolman comes on shift and finds that his car is low on oil, or that the windows are dirty, or that the officer on the previous shift reported that the car had transmission trouble. These events can both elevate arousal and adversely influence the officer's cognitive structuring of subsequent experiences. Cognitive determinants of anger consist of the recollections, appraisals, expectancies, and self-dialogues which precede and accompany the response to provocation. Cognitive structuring has been shown to influence the likelihood of aggression (Kaufman & Feshbach, 1963a, 1963b; Mallich & McCandless, 1966), and cognitive processes have been found to be important determinants of anger and reactions to stress (Averill, 1973; Brehm, Back, & Bognodoff, 1964; Schacter & Singer, 1962). Bandura (1973) has provided extensive coverage of cognitive determinants of aggression within his social learning theory. While anger and aggression are often not disentangled, the role of cognition in the arousal of anger is sufficiently substantiated. Thus, an officer's ruminations about criticism from his supervisor, attitudes toward particular social groups, rigid expectations of how people should behave during questioning, and selfstatements about things like a delayed vacation will influence the probability of anger in response to a suspect. Cognitively determined response sets incline an officer towards a certain mode of reaction which can work toward his gain or detriment. While certain cognitive structures are adaptive or instrumental responses that mark the experienced officer, other constructions and interpretations can be predisposing to conflict.

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Situational cues are those properties of behavior settings which act directly as anger elicitors. There exists an abundance of research on this aspect of anger sequences, albeit in the context of research on aggression. Most notably, Berko. witz and his colleagues (Berkowitz, 1964, 1973, 1974; Berkowitz & LePage, 1967; Geen & Berkowitz, 1966; Geen & O'Neal, 1969) have shown that internal and environmental cues evoke aggressive reactions through their prior association with reinforced aggression. Thus, certain expletives, automobile models, or physical characteristics such as long hair can elicit and intensify anger reactions for investigating officers. The person's mode of response to the provocation also has an important effect on the subsequent course of events. Endler and Hunt (1968) have shown that persons, situations, and modes of response each contribute to the variance in the arousal of anger. The manner in which one reacts to provocation can escalate the antagonism by further instigating the provocateur and giving justification for continued affronts. It can also short-circuit the sequence (momentarily) by a display of coercive power, or can steer the course of events into a more constructive mode of exchange. As Toch (1969) has shown, over-zealous interrogation and unnecessary roughness in response to a perceived personal challenge has resulted in many broken bodies, including those of police. Following the rapid exchange that often characterizes anger episodes, the consequences of the encounter will determine whether the person experiences a constructive closure on the incident or whether there is further agitation and disruption of performance. An officer whose antagonism resulted in the omission of pertinent information on a traffic citation may have embarassing moments in the courtroom, or a police-citizen encounter which ends on an antagonistic note can result in citizen complaints to the watch commander who may, in turn, rebuke the officer. In addition, when one has behaved in a way that might engender guilt or anxiety, self-stimulation to anger can serve as a way to cope with distress or dissonance by preempting the uneasy feelings (Kaufmann, 1965; Novaco, 1976). Skill Acquisition and Rehearsal. Following the cognitive preparation, the next step in the stress-inoculation training involves the provision of a set of skills or methods for the self-regulation of anger. These methods of anger regulation consist predominantly of cognitive control techniques. As stated by Averill (1973), "Cognitive control may be defined as the processing of potentially threatening information in such a manner as to reduce the net long-term stress and/or the psychic cost of adaptation" (p. 293). This phase of the program has two components: a self-help or problem-solving period and a didactic presentation. The process is begun by a series of small group exercises designed to promote the self-discovery of effective ways to manage provocation. This is accomplished by having the participants first describe on index cards three

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provocation experiences in vivid detail. They are then divided into small groups where each member presents his chosen scenario for discussion. For each presentation the group examines the situational determinants of anger, the variables that would exacerbate or ameliorate the antagonism, and the potential hazards in the situation for self and others. Their task is to act as consultants to each other and to generate some useful ways of handling the situation that minimize conflict and maximize efficiency. When the groups complete their round of presentations they are directed to abstract and summarize those strategies which they have found to facilitate the regulation of anger and promote efficiency. This is then followed by a round of intergroup exchange whereby each group selects a member for the role of "consultee" whose task is to move to an adjacent group and seek consultation for those situations and conflicts that are most problematic or refractory. Each group also appoints a "consultant" to act as the group spokesman for the consultation process. This procedure enables the participants to sharpen their awareness of stress situations and to formulate viable coping strategies that are grounded in police experience. The small group experience is then augmented by a didactic presentation on the regulation of anger that emphasizes cognitive self-control skills. The cognitive coping skills consist of (a) differential awareness of personal anger patterns, (b) attunement to anger arousal and its cognitive companions, (c) the ability to alternatively construe provocation, (d) covert self-instruction to guide cognitive structuring of events and nonantagonistic behavior, (e) belief in personal control during provocative encounter, and (f) the ability to remain task-oriented rather than ego-oriented when provoked. This last component is a central concept in the anger-control approach as it consists of learning how to defuse threats and abuse such that they are not taken personally and that the subject focuses on situational or task objectives. Given the circumstances under which police officers typically experience provocation, this becomes a most germane aspect of training. The task-oriented, problem-solving set is facilitated most effectively by coping self-statements. The systematic use of self-statements as a self-control strategy has received extensive promotion by Meichenbaum (1974) and has been further developed by the author for anger problems (Novaco, 1975). In order to use private speech as a coping device, it is first necessary to break down the provocation experience into a series of steps a n d stages. These consist of preparing for provocation, impact and confrontation, coping with arousal, and subsequent reflection. Some examples of self-statements for each of these stages are contained in Table IV. It should be noted that stages three and four provide for the possible failure of self-regulation or provocation management. The inclusion of stage three is based upon Meichenbaum's and Cameron's (1972) research which suggest that coping training that considered future incapacities is more effective than mastery-based treatments. Since the first application of the

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Table IV. Examples of Anger Management Self-Statements Rehearsed in Stress-Inoculation Training Preparing for a provocation This could be a rough situation, but I know how to deal with it. I can work out a plan to handle this. Easy does it. Remember , stick to the issues and don't take it personally. There won't be any need for an argument. I know what to do. Impact and confrontation As long as I keep my cool, I'm in control of the situation. You don't need to prove yourself. Don't make more out of this than you have to. There is no point in getting mad. Think of what you have to do. Look for the positives and don't jump to conclusions. Coping with arousal Muscles are getting tight. Relax and slow things down. Time to take a deep breath. Let's take the issue point by point. My anger is a signal of what I need to do. Time for problem solving. He probably wants me to get angry, but I'm going to deal with it constructively. Subsequent reflection a. Conflict unresolved Forget about the aggravation. Thinking about it only makes you upset. Try to shake it off. Don't let it interfere with your job. Remember relaxation. It's a lot better than anger. Don't take it personally. It's probably not so serious. b.

Conflict resolved I handled that one pretty well. That's doing a good job! I could have gotten more upset than it was worth. My pride can get me into trouble, but I'm doing better at this all the time. I actually got through that without getting angry.

staging strategy to anger regulation (Novaco, 1975), the author has also modified the fourth stage to distinguish the differential outcome of attempts at coping. This followed from the recognition that cognitive processes can seriously prolong the duration of anger after an interaction has terminated and thus require an additional component. Thus, self-regulated private speech functions as an instructional cue that guides one's thoughts, feelings, and behavior. The introduction of anger regulation is then supplemented by a presenta. tion of behavioral skills in provocation management. These pertain to the officer's role as an interventionist in a conflict between disputing parties. Although this is the domain of crisis-intervention training, the focus here is on sequences of anger and aggression whose lack of resolution can have direct and indirect effects on the officer. Three basic areas are addressed: (a) personal safety: being alert for ambush and the potentially volatile components of a situation with a discussion of defensive skills that are aimed at subduing an antagonist without instigating an escalation of conflict; (b) strategies to defuse the provoca-

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tion: tactics for physical separation of disputants, choice of behavior settings, and interviewing skills that enable the officer to listen to feelings and develop empathic understanding; and (c) conflict resolution techniques: methods of fostering improved communication between disputing parties and arriving at mutually beneficial outcomes. Conflict resolution procedures aim at helping the parties of a dispute, which has built to a point of intense hostility, recognize the difference between their feelings of anger (which are often justifiable) and their threatened or actual aggression (which is usually not justifiable). The task is to help them see the expression of anger as legitimate when it takes the form of a communication that the other person can deal with constructively. As interventionists, the officers need to recognize when members of an argument are behaving in ways having a high probability of eliciting greater antagonism and a lowered probability of problem resolution. Bach and Wyden's (1969) colloquial portrayals of maladaptire styles of anger expression (e.g., "kitchen sink fighters," "monologing") are very appropriate for this purpose. Proficiency is also fostered through exposure to techniques of behavioral contracting which consist of negotiating agreements by which everyone profits (Gottman & Leiblum, 1974). Application and Practice. Skills-training approaches (D'Zurilla & Goldfried, 1971; Meichenbaum, 1975) emphasize the value of application practice. Meichenbaum and Cameron (1972) found that the mere rehearsal of cognitive self-control skills (in their case, self-instructions about approaching a phobic object) without the opportunity for application-training on other stress tasks had a diminished effect in obtaining behavioral and affective change. In the present procedure, the rehearsal of coping strategies is followed by a period of regulated exposure to provocative situations in which these skills can be practiced. Since the regulation of anger is linked to the ability to manage a provocative situation, the officers are provided with a way to test and calibrate their competence. Role-playing methods are most suitable for this purpose. Through a judicious selection of scenarios, the participants are given the opportunity to test their proficiency in anger management with a less extreme version of a provocation than they are likely to encounter on the job. The author has found role-play provocations to be very effective for inducing anger arousal, as they have produced blood pressure elevations as high as 15-20 mm (Novaco, 1975). I n using these techniques with police officers, participants have even been reluctant to terminate interactions which had become quite engrossing. Mills (1969; 1973) has used role-play procedures during recruit selection to evaluate candidates for their emotional stability and prudence in stress situations. He has reported that some men have "actually simulated gunfire" during a tense roleplay situation (Mills, 1973). Given the amount of friction that is routinely encountered by law enforcement officers, there is a wide assortment of situations from which role-play

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scenarios can be selected. An example of a provocation incident used in role play involves a triffic stop and is given below. While on patrol you notice that a car ahead of you is carrying expired plates. You turn on your lights to pull the car over, but the driver turns at the next intersection and continues on as if he didn't see you. Pursuing the vehicle you hit the siren, and he finally pulls over. You approach the vehicle and ask for license and registration. The driver states that he has misplaced the registration, so you return to your unit to radio for a records check and while waiting you notice that his left front tire is very worn. When you call his attention to this, he becomes hostile and sarcastic. At that point you request that he get out of the car and open the trunk to show you his spare. With a smirk on his face, he gets out of the car, fumbles through his pockets and claims that he has lost the trunk key and cannot open the trunk. The provocative impact of the role-play situations can be graduated in intensity and complexity as the scenarios incorporate more ego-threat dimensions, such as the verbal abuse likely to be encountered in barrooms, which directly challenge the officer's manhood, question his maternal ancestry, or remark on his wife's occupation. When the role-play interactions are conducted in small groups, those participants acting as observers are able to provide support and corrective feedback that facilitate the learning process. The use of video tape recording which has a high popularity in the training o f helping agents also is a valuable adjunct as it enables a detailed examination of provocation cues and coping strategies. Bandura (1973) suggested the modeling of adept response patterns by exemplary officers, and this can be achieved by enlisting the cooperation o f the supervisory officers (sergeants and lieutenants) who are in attendance.

IMPLICATIONS FOR OFFICER SELECTION AND RESEARCH

The stress inoculation workshop is an attempt to extend concepts of anger control developed in a clinical arena to a population o f community gatekeepers who have a unique task regarding the management of anger. The workshop has been offered to police officers in southern California and in Indiana. Thus far, 74% o f the participants have rated the overall quality o f the workshop from good to excellent. However, consumer satisfaction indices have transparent limitations. While the present paper has described a supplementary training for law enforcement personnel, outcome data on the procedures must now be collected to empirically establish their merit. This will require both an analysis o f behavior change within the workshop itself and follow-up measures o f job performance impact. Obtaining data on behavioral and emotional change criteria during training programs of the sort described is made difficult by the number of participants involved and the limited amount of time allocated to training. Individualized testing is simply not feasible. However, a rigorous analysis o f workshop-induced change could be accomplished by means o f a group presentation o f anger stimuli

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on film using a pretest-posttest control group design. Existing police training fihns, such as "Humiliation and Anger," by Film Modules, Inc., and "Play It Cool," by the Institute for Law Enforcement Education, portray situations in which officers are taunted and incited to anger. The first of these films was used by Mann (1973) in his police consultation project. Films of this genre could be edited to provide suitable stimulus conditions for the pre- and posttest conditions, having established their comparability empirically by preliminary investigation. Program participants and control subjects would be shown the film segments, counterbalanced within experimental conditions. Ratings of the degree of anger experienced, feelings toward particular provocateurs, and a statement of the course of action one would take in handling the portrayed situation might serve as dependent measures. The designated action plans would be evaluated by judges for provocation management value. In evaluating the performance of program participants against that of nonparticipating control ofricers, random assignment to treatment conditions is unlikely to be achieved, hence pretest scores should be used as covariates in the analyses. These measures along with evaluations by participants of each component of the training would constitute a more refined examination of immediate program impact. More enduring changes could be evaluated by follow-up measures in a time series design. Since training workshops often consist of a mixture of supervisors and patrol officers, performance ratings on anger criteria could be obtained from the supervisors over a designated period. Archival data, such as citizen complaints, and repeated self-report ratings by participants are potential time series measures. In addition to the training of law enforcement personnel, the anger-management concepts have implications for the selection of officer candidates. Among the characteristics of successful patrolmen identified by Baehr, Furcon, and Froemel (1969) were diverse forms of personal stability that stemmed from the control of emotional impulses, an attitude of cooperation rather than hostility and competition, and a resistance to stress. However, the selection of police officers is unquestionably an area where considerable research is yet needed, as there is no clear information about what makes a successful policeman (Smith & Stotland, 1973). The process of selection also consists of a decision procedure where false negatives abound since there are often a multitude of candidates for a handful of positions. A most extreme example of this state of affairs is the city of Irvine, California, where in the summer of 1975 there were 1,700 unsolicited inquiries for a single patrolman position. The ability to regulate anger and manage provocation has an important bearing on job satisfaction as well as on an officer's human relations performance. In their review of officer selection, Smith and Stotland (1973) concluded that "an examination of the role of the police officer indicates that

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the central problem he faces is the management of conflict, both intra and interpersonal" (p. 12). Although conflict and stress take many forms, the experience of anger in response to provocation has a paramount significance for police officers. It would seem pertinent that criteria used for the selection of candidates consist of the person's tolerance for provocation and his ability to cope constructively with anger. An officer who is prone to anger arousal is not only a liability to the community and the department, but under the high risk conditions of police work he is also susceptible to hypertension and coronary ailments which mark disability lists. Hypertension is clearly a multivariate condition, yet sufficient evidence exists which implicates the involvement of anger and stress (Novaco, 1975). The development of coronary artery disease has been increasingly linked to conditions of stress and the individual's style of coping with environmental demands (Friedman & Rosenman, 1974). The relevance of the stress hypotheses to police officers can perhaps be discerned from the fact that from 1971-1974 in the State of California, 59.1% of the job-connected deaths for local law enforcement officers were due to cardiovascular injury or disease. This is compared with 22.5% due to assault and with less than 10% due to a motor vehicle accident (State of California, Division of Labor Statistics, 1975). Since officers are selected on physical agility criteria, it is striking that a police officer is nearly three times as likely to die from a heart attack as from any other cause. Presently, there exists no controlled research on stress-related disabilities for police officers, yet this certainly is an area worthy of examination. Psychometric instruments such as the MMPI do have utility in screening out seriously maladjusted persons, but the more difficult selection decisions occur when a more intensive look is taken at the smaller group of candidates who have exceeded the cutting scores on written exams. Regarding the assessment of provocation proneness, responses obtained by self-report measures are likely to be affected by social desirability and situational demand factors. A more sensitive and discriminating approach would consist of situational tests conducted in a role-play format that permit the assessment of the course of action chosen by a candidate, as well as his level of arousal (Mills, 1969; 1973; Novaco, 1975; Smith & Stotland, 1973). The development of a standardized approach to this process, specifically incorporating a behavior rating system, would be a worthy advance in selection methodology. The prospective procedures and measures of anger management could be validated prior to their use in selection by examining the job performance records of policemen as a function of their performance on the situational tests, i.e., conduct a post hoc investigation of high risk versus low risk officers as identified by the angermanagement indices. Quite unfortunately, little research has been done to identify the favorable characteristics of police officers that are associated with successful performance.

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Ample work has been undertaken in the investigation o f unfavorable or psychopathic attributes, perhaps due to stereotypes of a "police personality" and the convenience of clinical scales. While the present paper is more explicit about who not to select, it has also suggested the qualities of persons who should be selected. Mills (1972) has identified the attributes that he finds predictive of superior police work as (a) motivation for a law enforcement career, (b) normal self-assertion, (c) emotional stability and good judgment under stress, (d) sensitivity toward minority groups and social deviates, (e) colloborative leadership skills (f) flexibility, and (g) mature relationship to social authority. In accord with Mills, it is felt that law enforcement personnel must have the capacity for flexibility in the appraisal of provoking circumstances, yet be able to respond to them in an assertive, problem-solving fashion. However, it must be recognized that the judicious selection of officers can only follow from an articulation of community law enforcement values. Concerns about officer selection must be discussed within the domain of public and organizational policy. A thorough analysis of selection issues is unlikely to occur outside that arena.

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A stress inoculation approach to anger management in the training of law enforcement officers.

American Journal of Community Psychology, VoL 5, No. 3, 1977 A Stress Inoculation Approach to Anger Management in the Training of Law Enforcement Of...
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