La gestion de la colère selon Novaco, en pratique

Stress inoculation for anger — the triggers, the arousal, and the appraisal

How does Novaco anger management work?

The Novaco Anger Scale (NAS) is a psychological assessment instrument developed by Raymond Novaco to measure anger disposition. It is typically paired with the Provocation Inventory (PI) and published together as the NAS-PI. Broadly, the NAS asks about how a person experiences anger across cognitive, arousal and behavioural domains, while the Provocation Inventory asks how intensely different kinds of situations provoke them — so the pair distinguishes a person’s general anger disposition from what specifically sets them off. It is a copyrighted clinical instrument intended for administration and interpretation by qualified professionals, and it has been used substantially in forensic and clinical settings. Two things worth being clear about: a scale like this is an assessment, not a treatment, and a score is meaningful only when interpreted by a clinician against the proper norms. This page does not administer or score the NAS and cannot tell you your result — it explains what the instrument is, and then sets out the anger model Novaco built alongside it and the practices that follow from it.

Raymond Novaco’s name reaches most people through two connected things: the Novaco Anger Scale, the assessment instrument, and the anger treatment model it grew out of. If you came looking for the scale, the short version is that the NAS — usually published with the Provocation Inventory as the NAS-PI — is a formal, copyrighted psychometric instrument for measuring anger disposition and provocation sensitivity, designed to be administered and interpreted by a qualified professional against established norms. It is not a quiz, and an online approximation of it would not tell you anything trustworthy. We do not reproduce, administer, or score it here; if you want an actual assessment, that is a conversation with a clinician. What we can usefully set out is the model behind it. Novaco’s framework, developed in the 1970s and refined over decades of clinical and correctional research, reframes anger not as a personality flaw but as a trainable arousal–cognition loop: a trigger fires an appraisal, the appraisal amplifies arousal, and the arousal narrows thinking toward aggression. Breaking any link in that chain reduces the response, and that is what the treatment approach targets. The practices below work each link, with an honest read on the evidence behind them.