Clients with high trait anger, who were therefore likely to resist directive interventions, were more successful with a motivational enhancement intervention.

He remarked that it would be possible to evaluate this association by matching patients' likelihood to accept directive interventions to either brief, directive physician-implemented interventions or specialist-based motivational interventions.

Sticking with directive interventions does not prompt children to come up with effective solutions to conflict as it arises-strategies that work because they take into account both the child's and the playmate's desires.

In more recent times this theory (which has been the orthodoxy of post-war European Communist parties and Stalinist accounts of modern capitalism) has been further refined to take account of the ever-increasing directive interventions of the state into the private economy, on top of earlier moves to provide social welfare concessions.