A neurolinguistic treatment for reducing parental anger responses and creating more resourceful behavioral options.
Author: Brandis, Alan D.
Year of publication: 1986
Publishing house / periodical / university: Dissertation Abstracts International 47(11), 4642-B California School of Professional Psychology, 161 pp. Order = DA862614
Abstract
This study tested an experimental intervention utilizing techniques of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) to help parents reduce their anger responses toward their children. A new instrument, the Parental Provocation Inventory (PPI), was developed to assess changes in parental anger responses. The PPI is composed of 16 vignettes of parent-child situations requiring a parental response, which were grouped into four scales by a factor analysis. The scales were reliable by test-retest and were orthagonal, as demonstrated in the pilot study. Another instrument, the Parents’ Report (PR), was used for comparison. The Parent Training Procedure (PTP) is a highly structured intervention which utilizes Anchoring, in which external stimuli (“anchors”) are associated with inner response strategies in order to stabilize, transfer, and combine them. One technique used was the Collapse Anchors procedure in which one anchor, associated with appropriate inner resources or abilities, is “fired” simultaneously with another anchor, associated with an inner representation of a problem situation. The anchors are thus “collapsed” and the needed resources or abilities are then available in the problem situation. A Self- Anchoring procedure, in which subjects were taught to “fire” their resource anchors in actual parent-child situations, was also utilized. A detailed outline of the PTP was adhered to, and Programmer’s Checklists were used to record each step of the intervention. The two instruments were administered before and after the PTP. A control group was pre- and post-tested but received no treatment. ANOVA’s and Eta(2) coefficients yielded no significance. However, a post-hoc analysis revealed that a strong experimental effect was demonstrated on the PPI by four (half) of the Experimental group subjects, dubbed the “High Change” subgroup (the other four, the “Low Change” subgroup). The differences between these subgroups could not be explained by differences at pre-test, which were negligible, nor by the differential effect of the two programmers. Analysis of the Programmer’s Checklists revealed that the subgroup differences were strongly related to the differential success of the Self- Anchoring portion of the PTP, somewhat less so to the differential success of the Collapse Anchors portion. Recommendations for future research are made.