Effects of Animated Movies on the Aggression and Behavior Performance of Primary School Students and Their Control Using a Cognitive Behavioral Anger-Control Training (CBACT) Program.

This work is a combination of two studies, and , which aimed to examine the impact of animated movies on the aggression and behavioral performance of primary school students, as well as their control using the CBACT program. In , the influence of animated movies on 300 students from ten primary schools in Pakistan with gender differences (50% male), family systems, and viewing time duration was examined. This study was performed on 7- to 9-year-old children on four subscales of the Buss-Perry aggression questionnaire (BPAQ), three subscales of the child behavior questionnaire (CBQ), and toy selection. Following that, in the CBACT intervention was applied to aggressive students (n = 46) selected from . Students were randomly divided into CBACT treatment (50%) and control groups. The results of indicated that violent animated movies had a greater impact on the aggressive behavior of male students than on that of females, while girls were more affected by watching nonviolent movies. Furthermore, male viewers from nuclear families and females from joint families showed more aggressive problems. It was also observed that aggression in students significantly increased ( < 0.001) with increasing viewing animation time duration (10 to 30 min). The results of showed that aggression in the treatment group was significantly reduced ( = 0.000) with the CBACT program but remained constant for the control group. The findings of showed that violent animation is strongly linked with aggression and behavioral performance in primary school students. The CBACT program in Study II indicates that students may not be completely eliminated from watching violent movies, but their aggression levels were reduced when they watched animated movies. Therefore, the CBACT program opens a new window into behavioral problem treatment, which is casually influenced by violent media.