Aggression is one of the prevalent behavioral issues among adolescents, negatively affecting academic performance, peer and family relationships, and overall psychosocial functioning. This pilot study examined the preliminary effectiveness of Make the Difference, a fully automated, school-embedded digital intervention addressing aggression. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest-follow-up design with a comparison group was used. The program blended Cognitive Behavioral Theory (CBT)-based skills with elements of positive psychology and mindfulness. Forty-nine students aged 11–12 years, attending the last two grades of Greek primary school, completed the intervention and all assessments, and fifty-five students of the same age and grades served as a comparison group, completing only the assessments. Repeated measures analyses of student self-reported aggression indicated reductions in physical, verbal, indirect, and relational aggression, as well as anger and hostility, for the intervention group relative to the comparison group. Reductions were maintained at the 4-month follow-up, with scores remaining significantly lower than at pretest. Overall, the findings provide preliminary evidence that a fully automated, school-embedded digital intervention may help reduce multiple forms of aggression in preadolescents, although further controlled evaluations with larger samples are needed.
Krommydas et al. (Fri,) studied this question.