Coping Power is an evidenced-based manualized intervention (Lochman, Wells, & Lenhart, 2008) that is designed to target key social-cognitive deficits in children with aggressive behavior. Coping Power is based on a contextual social-cognitive model (Lochman & Wells, 2002), and addresses aggressive children’s social information-processing distortions (hostile encoding; hostile attributional biases) and deficiencies (dominance and revenge oriented social goals; problem solving that relies on direct action strategies rather than verbal assertion or help seeking; expectations that aggressive behavior will lead to satisfactory outcomes for the child). The model also addresses children’s tendencies to become overaroused, especially when angry, when social problems are perceived. Contextual factors contributing to children’s aggression include harsh, inconsistent parenting, and involvement with deviant peer groups. Using cognitive-behavioral strategies to influence mutable mechanisms in this contextual social-cognitive model, children are taught to use social problem-solving, goal-setting and emotional regulation skills. The full curriculum includes a parenting component, but due to the RCT’s focus on the child intervention, the parenting curriculum was not implemented in this study.
