The Effects of Platoon Leader Mental Health and Resilience Training on Soldier Problematic Anger
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: The DoD has prioritized programs to optimize readiness by enhancing resilience of its service members. Problematic anger in the military is an issue that impacts psychological well-being and resilience. Leader support is a potential tactic for reducing anger and its effects. Currently military resilience training is focused on individual level resilience. A gap exists in such training and there is a need to train leaders to provide mental health and resilience support to their subordinates. The present study developed and tested a theory-based training aimed at platoon leaders that focused on how to engage in proactive and responsive mental health and resilience-supportive behaviors through guided discussion, scenarios, and computer-based training with embedded quizzes. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We conducted an Institutional Review Board-approved cluster randomized controlled trial to test the effects of a leadership training with Army platoon leaders (n = 99) and soldiers (n = 276) in 2 brigades at an active duty military installation in the USA. Training was conducted in person with a computer-based component. Soldiers completed online surveys 1 month prior and again 3 months after the leader training. RESULTS: Post-training results demonstrated significant leader learning effects (Cohen's d = 1.56) and leader positive reactions to the training information, with leaders reporting the information as useful and relevant to their work. Service members in the treatment group reported significantly lower levels of anger at time 2 (b = -0.18, SE = 0.06, P = .002, pseudo ΔR2 = 0.01; d = 0.27) compared to the control group. We also found an indirect effect of the intervention on increased life satisfaction at time 2 via decreased anger (b = 0.035, SE = 0.023, 95% CI = [0.004-0.24]). CONCLUSIONS: This study provides an initial evaluation of training for platoon leaders that educates them on proactive and responsive behavioral strategies to support the mental health and resilience of their service members via decreased problematic anger and increased well-being. Further adaptations and evaluations should be conducted with other military branches and civilian occupations, as the benefits of the relatively brief and noninvasive training could be widespread.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".