Effects of extracurricular martial arts practice on the trait of anger among boys and girls aged 9-12 years old

Nowadays, aggression in children is an alarming problem and there are more and more programs carried out with students in order to reduce violence and aggressive behaviour. Martial arts have been used, on occasions, in these programs due to the values of respect and self-control that give it. However, they have not always obtained the expected results. The purpose of this paper is to observe is martial arts like judo and karate are a successful method to decrease anger levels in children. To evaluate this, a quasi-experimental longitudinal study during a period of 6 months in which 82 children took part, divided in a control group and an experimental group (karate and judo). State -Trait Anger Expression Inventory for Children and Adolescents (STAXI-NA) was used. Meaningful differences were found only in some of the anger components, between anger-in expression pre-tests of the control and experimental group and between anger -out expression pre-tests and post-tests of the karate group. The results obtained in this study suggest that the martial arts training has no effect about global anger management in children students. Common aspects are pointed out in interventions that have decreased the levels of anger (traditional aspects, design of a specific program, subjects with behavior problems, school context) and it is shown with the results obtained, how a habitual intervention carried out in a context of sports clubs, in a normal population and without a specific program, have difficulties in reducing the anger of the participants.