Browsing by Author "Jäppinen, Petra"

Children´s aggressive behavior is a worrying phenomenon in school environment. Over fifty per cent of special education teachers have reported students acting aggressively in school. The behavior makes it hard for the teachers to do their job and for pupils to learn and feel comfortable in school. Aggressive behavior is explained by many different theories, from frustration theory to model learning. Children´s aggressive behavior is often explained by social information processing problems. Pupils who tend to act aggressively often have a hostile attribution bias where they interpret peers or other´s actions in hostile way even in a neutral situation. In these situations, the child chooses an aggressive way to react in order to protect self. The aim of this study is to see what kind of interventions are there for children who act aggressively, how effective they are and what kind of meters are used to detect the effectiveness. The study is executed as a systematic literature review. Seven research article´s, which examined about intervention´s used to deal with children with aggressive behavior, were chosen in to the study. According to this study intervention´s which aimed at changing children´s hostile attribution bi-as were effective in decreasing children´s aggressive behavior. Children´s willingness to act ag-gressively decreased, they took the responsibility from their actions more likely and decoded their peer´s actions more positively, when the intervention had a positive impact on child´s hos-tile attribution bias. In some studies, the children also received intervention about social skills, which altered their perception about peer´s actions towards more positive. Also, teachers part in child´s aggressive behavior was studied, and found that teacher’s empathy had an impact in child´s aggressive behavior. On the grounds of this review it is important in the future to focus on aggressively behaving child´s attribution biases and how to prevent them. Would also be important to study more about teacher´s role in child´s aggressive behavior because the correla-tion between teacher´s increasing empathy and child´s decreasing aggressive behavior. In the future studies should have more adult´s evaluations about child´s actions, as many of the stud-ies in this review were based on child´s self-evaluation.