An educational intervention program for children between
kindergarten and 10th grade, known as Fast Track, reduces aggressive
behavior later in life, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for
Psychological Science.
The research, led by psychological scientist Justin Carré of
Nipissing University in Ontario, Canada, indicates that dampened testosterone
levels in response to social threats may account for the intervention’s success
in reducing aggression.
The Fast Track intervention program teaches children social
cognitive skills, such as emotional regulation and social problem solving, and
previous research suggests that the program may lead to decreased antisocial
behavior and aggression in childhood and adolescence.
But it wasn’t clear whether the skills that children learned in
the program would have impacts that carried over into adulthood.
Carré and colleagues suspected that the program would have
long-term effects, and that those effects would be linked to a specific
biological mechanism: alterations in testosterone reactivity to social
provocation.
To test these hypotheses, the researchers recruited 63
participants from Fast Track schools in Durham, North Carolina. To ensure the
participants in the sample were similar demographically, all of the
participants were African American men who were about 26 years old.
Half of those participants were involved in the Fast Track
program from ages 5 to 17, consisting of tutoring, peer coaching, home and
family visits, and social-emotional learning lessons with friends. The rest of
the participants attended the same schools but weren’t involved in the Fast
Track program.
More than 8 years after the intervention ended, the researchers
brought the participants into the lab to play a game, the goal of which was to
earn as much money as possible by pressing three buttons: one which accrued
money, one which prevented money from being stolen, and another which stole
money from an opponent. The participants believed they were playing against an
actual opponent, but the game was actually determined by a computer program.
The fictitious opponent provoked participants during the task by stealing their
hard-earned money.
Overall, participants who completed the Fast Track program
showed less aggression toward their opponent – that is, they opted to steal
less money from their opponent than did participants who didn’t complete Fast
Track.
Participants who hadn’t received the intervention showed an
increase in testosterone levels after having their money stolen, but Fast Track
participants didn’t, a finding that could explain their reduced aggression.
“Interestingly, there were no differences between intervention
and control groups in baseline testosterone concentrations or aggressive
behavior at the beginning of the experiment,” Carré explains. “Differences in
aggressive behavior and testosterone concentrations emerged only later in the
game.”
Ultimately, the findings suggest that Fast Track was successful
in reducing participants’ aggression toward a hostile peer in part because it
changed the way their neuroendocrine systems responded to social provocation.
Now that they’re confident that the effects of the Fast Track
program reach into adulthood, the researchers are interested in determining
which specific components of the intervention are most effective in reducing
aggression, what neural mechanisms underlie aggressive behavior, and whether
these results also ring true for women who have participated in the program.
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