Abstract
Pathological gaming among adolescents has been reported to hamper the achievement of a balanced life and to threaten the development of social competencies. Despite the increasing social concerns on the adolescent users, however, the mechanism of gaming behavior of adolescents has not been sufficiently examined. This study explored the mechanism of pathological gaming among adolescents from 3-year longitudinal data of 778 Korean adolescent gamers, by analyzing the effects of negative affects (i.e., anxiety, loneliness, and academic stress) on the degree of pathological gaming through the mediation variables (i.e., aggression and self-control) based on the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework. Latent class analysis (LCA) was used to uncover potential risk groups, and through partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) analysis, the mediation pathways to pathological gaming were compared between the risk group and the non-risk group. The results highlighted the key role of academic stress on the degree of pathological gaming. In the entire group, academic stress primarily increased pathological gaming through self-control. The mediation path of self-control was the most influential result in the risk group. Aggression was the key mediator between loneliness and pathological gaming in the non-risk group. The theoretical and practical implications of the results were discussed.
Highlights
Pathological gaming hinders the achievement of a balanced life by weakening self-control over game use and thereby hampering the development of academic and work competencies (World Health Organization, 2018)
To discern how negative affects and mediators work as antecedents on the pathological gaming mechanism of the adolescents in the longitudinal axis, the proposed hypotheses were tested for these three groups: the entire population group (n = 778), the risk group (n = 355), and the non-risk group (n = 327)
In the results of the mediation analysis of the entire group (n = 778), the bootstrapping analysis showed that the seven indirect effects, excluding two paths, are statistically significant as follows: Anxiety → Aggression → Pathological gaming (β = 0.044, t-value = 3.610, LL = 0.022, and Upper Limit (UL) = 0.070); Anxiety → Self-control → Pathological gaming (β = 0.027, t-value = 2.389, LL = 0.007, and UL = 0.052); Loneliness → Aggression → Pathological gaming (β = 0.040, t-value = 3.335, LL = 0.020, and UL = 0.066); Loneliness → Self-control → Pathological gaming
Summary
Pathological gaming hinders the achievement of a balanced life by weakening self-control over game use and thereby hampering the development of academic and work competencies (World Health Organization, 2018). In order to understand the increase in the use of addictive games among adolescents and their effects, it is necessary to understand the mechanisms of adolescents’ gaming behavior Negative affects such as anxiety attract individuals to pathological gaming by cultivating evasive coping attitudes such as denial of the problem, avoidance of problem solving, and pursuit of immediate compensation (Caplan, 2002). This evasive coping mechanism can breed such a vicious cycle of sequential repetition that the individual becomes excessively immersed in the game (Petry et al, 2014; Paulus et al, 2018). A more in-depth and multi-faceted study on the relationship between pathological gaming among adolescents, their negative affects, and their not yet fully developed ability to control their emotions compared to adults is required to arrest pathological gaming among adolescents (Ahmed et al, 2015)
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