Abstract
Outcome expectancies have been found to play important roles in addictive behaviors. Research has shown that implicit outcome expectancies (OE) were significantly correlated with Internet gaming behaviors among players with Internet gaming disorder (IGD). However, few empirical studies have further examined the relationship between implicit OE and players with IGD. This study first strengthened the implicit association between Internet games and negative outcomes using an evaluative conditioning paradigm (EC) and then examined the effects of increasing the negativity of implicit OE on Internet gaming impulsivity. Thirty-nine college students who were diagnosed as players with IGD participated in the study. Manipulation checks showed that after the EC was introduced, participants associated Internet gaming stimuli more closely with negative outcomes than with positive outcomes. After the implicit OE were effectively altered to be negative, players with IGD performed better in the delay discounting paradigm, showing a lower impulsivity with respect to Internet gaming.
Highlights
Internet gaming has become a dominant leisure activity of young people's life [1]
We estimated whether the implicit Internet gaming outcome expectancies (OE) became more negative after performing the evaluative conditioning paradigm (EC) paradigm
We compared the strength of association that players with Internet gaming disorder (IGD) exhibited when associating Internet gaming words with positive and negative outcomes before and after performing the EC paradigm
Summary
In a recent report from the China Internet Network Information Center, more than half (58.4%) of the overall Internet users in China are active gamers [2]. The excessive use of Internet games can lead to an Internet gaming disorder (IGD) [3] that can cause severe damage to young people's mental health and social functioning [4,5,6,7]. Like people who suffer from substance dependence or pathological gambling, the most important trait of gamers with IGD is believed to be impulsivity. Gamers with IGD demonstrated higher self-reported impulsivity in questionnaires [13, 14] but were less able to control their impulses in behavioral experiments. Using the delay discounting paradigm, adolescents with IGD were found to be more likely to overvalue immediate outcomes and neglect future outcomes, suggesting that impulsivity may be a behavioral marker of IGD [15]
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