Background. Anger is one of basic emotion. Anger comes as response from one’s negative perception toward a situation or when the situation is not in accordance with expected. It can be expressed constructively or destructively. The destructive anger that accompanied with the increase in frequency and intensity are potential to cause problems. One group that is hard to control the anger is adolescents. Further, the adolescents, who are constantly angry and difficult to manage their anger, are vulnerable to get behavioral problem, such as self-harmful behavior, destroying anything, fighting with others, and adjustment problem at school. One way to for the adolescent who has below average of intelligence. The participants of this study is one female adolescent who has borderline intelligence. She often gets angry for situation that is considered annoying for her. She would curse; hit, push, or kick other; or throw anything when angry. She could get angry until 3-4 times for a week. Generally, the anger emerges at home although also found at school. The aim of this research is to reduce aggressive responses when angry in an adolescent with borderline intelligence through implementation of anger treatment with a cognitive-behavioral approach.

Methods. This is a single case study (n=1), using A-B with follow-up research design. The participant of this research is a thirteen-year-old. The program of this research refers to anger treatment with cognitive-behavioral approach for people with intellectual disabilities developed by Taylor and Novaco (2005). Measurements were taken before and after intervention program through self-report, such as Anger Expression Scale for Children (AESC) from Steele, Legerski, Nelson, and Phipps (2009); self-rating, such as anger thermometer from Taylor and Novaco (2005); and inventory scale, such as Child Behavior Checlist (CBCL) from Achenbach (1991). This study consists of 3 steps: pre-intervention, intervention, and post-intervention. There are 11 sessions in intervention step, including 3 preparation sessions and 8 treatment sessions. One session took 60-100 minutes.

Results. The result of this study indicate that anger treatment with a cognitive-behavioral approach is succeed in order to reduce aggressive responses when angry in an adolescent with borderline intelligence. These result are seen from the changes in expression of anger shown by participant between before and after the intervention was given. Before the intervention, participant express her anger with a various aggressive ways, such as yelling, utter harsh words, hitting, kicking, throwing, or destroying things. After the intervention, participant tend to be able to control her anger by not displaying aggressive response. Yelling, utter harsh words were rarely appear. Bhave and Saini (2009) stated that learning how to manage anger could lead people to express their anger in positive way. Spesifically, three components in anger treatment with a cognitive-behavioral approach, namely physiological, cognitive, and behavioral components, are accurate to overcome anger problem.  .

Conclusions. Anger treatment with a cognitive-behavior approach is effective to reduce aggressive responses when angry in an adolescent with borderline intelligence.

.

Added-Values. This study give the contribution for using anger treatment with a cognitive-behavior approach for adolescent with borderline intelligence. For this, there are some modifications of Taylor and Novaco’s.

Keywords: aggressive, anger treatment, borderline intelligence, cognitive-behavioral approach,adolescent

Word count: 511 (exclude keywords, title, and author’s information)