The effectiveness of group cognitive-behavioral therapy in reducing aggression symptoms in girls of high school students

The study aimed at evaluating the group cognitive -behavioral therapy impact on reducing aggression symptoms in high school girl students. The study adopted an experimental study with pre-test and post-test design with control group. The statistical population consisted of all girl students at high school level in Sari in the academic year of 2012-2013. Cluster random sampling was conducted to choose the subject for the study. At the beginning 3 high schools were selected from district 1 and 2 in Sari, then two classes from each grade from each school were randomly selected and the subjects responded to Buss Aggression Questionnaire (BSQ). Among all the participants summing up to 180, 16 subjects were eligible (having aggression diagnostic cut scores) and were confirmed by the psychiatric diagnosis and were randomly selected and assigned to two experimental and control groups. The experimental group participated in group cognitive - behavioral therapy session for a month and a half (10 sessions each lasting 90 minutes). To analyze the data assuming the equality of variances, the Leuven test was used and t-test was used to test the hypotheses. The results showed that the post-test aggression mean scores in both groups revealed a significant difference compared to that of pre-test indicating that aggression symptoms in the experimental group after the given treatment in comparison with the control group witnessed a decrease. Therefore, it is concluded that cognitive -behavioral therapy serves as an effective treatment for reducing aggression symptoms in adolescents.