Abstract
The significance of probability discounting (PD) among individuals with Internet gaming disorder (IGD) remains unclear. Following the PRISMA guidelines, we systematically searched the PubMed, Embase, and ScienceDirect databases for English articles on Internet addiction that included comparison between individuals with and without IGD as well as probabilistic discounting task as the main outcome from January 1970 to July 2020 using the appropriate keyword strings. The primary outcome was the overall difference in rate of PD, while the secondary outcomes included the difference in PD with magnitude of probabilistic reward and response time of the PD task. Effect size (ES) was calculated through dividing the group means (e.g., h value or AUC) by the pooled standard deviations of the two groups. A total of five studies with 300 participants (i.e., IGD group, n = 150, mean age = 20.27 ± 2.68; healthy controls, n = 150, mean age = 20.70 ± 2.81) were analyzed. The IGD group was more willing to take risks in probabilistic gains but performances on probabilistic losses were similar between the two groups. The IGD group also exhibited a shorter response time (Hedge’s g = − 0.51; 95%CI = − 0.87 to − 0.15). Meta-regression demonstrated a positive correlation between maximum reward magnitude and PD rate (p < 0.04). However, significant publication bias was noted among the included studies (Egger’s test, p < 0.01). In conclusion, individuals with IGD seemed more impulsive in making risky decisions, especially when the potential gains were expected. Our findings not only supported the use of PD for assessing individuals with IGD but may also provide new insights into appropriate interventions.
Highlights
The significance of probability discounting (PD) among individuals with Internet gaming disorder (IGD) remains unclear
Our results showed that individuals with IGD had a lower degree of PD compared with that in their comparators with moderate effect size (g = − 0.46; 95% CI = − 0.72 to − 0.20), suggesting that individuals with IGD tend to overestimate the possibility of a substantial gain and underestimate the likelihood of gaining nothing than their healthy counterpart
Despite previous inconsistent findings about the differences in the rate of PD between subjects with IGD and normal controls, our study showed that the former had a lower PD rate than that in the latter with a moderate effect size, suggesting that subjects with IGD tended to underestimate the consequences of risky behaviors compared to the tendency in healthy controls
Summary
The significance of probability discounting (PD) among individuals with Internet gaming disorder (IGD) remains unclear. The mechanism underlying IGD remained unclear, studies have shown that participants with IGD may make more impulsive decision compared with healthy c ontrol[6]. Neuroimaging studies demonstrated that participants with IGD showed decreased frontal brain responses during processing of losing outcomes, suggesting their decreased sensitivity to losses during decision-making. Impulsive choice is often regarded as risk-based decision-making, while delay discounting (DD) and probabilistic discounting (PD) both are important methods for investigating the underlying behavioral m echanisms[8]. The hyperbolic model of probability discounting functions[21,22] has two free parameters: the parameter h, which reflects the discounting rate (i.e., the value of the probabilistic gain is discounted), and the parameter s, which governs the shape of the discounting function[22]
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