Professor California State University, San Bernadino San Bernardino, California
Our increasingly technology-driven society has seen a dramatic increase in excessive video gaming. Emerging evidence suggests that psychological distress and avoidance are associated with problematic Internet use including gaming in vulnerable individuals (Burleigh et al., 2017; Rapinda et al., 2021; Yang et al., 2021). There is also evidence that problematic internet gaming is associated with psychological inflexibility (Chou et al., 2017) and difficulties in emotion regulation (Blasi et al., 2019). Although existing evidence points to a relationship between psychological distress (e.g., anxiety, depression, loneliness) and problematic internet gaming, less is known about the possible psychological mechanisms for this relationship. The proposed study intends to expand on existing research by investigating the role of inflexible and dysregulated responses to psychological distress in problematic video gaming. Specifically, we hypothesized that psychological distress (i.e., anxiety, depression & loneliness) will be associated with problematic video gaming, and these relationships will be mediated by psychological inflexibility and emotion dysregulation. Participants consisted of 112 mostly Latinx college women who completed all study surveys online for extra course credit. Preliminary analyses revealed that psychological inflexibility, but not difficulties with emotion regulation, mediated the relationship between three forms of psychological distress (i.e., anxiety, depression and loneliness) and problematic gaming. For the loneliness model, loneliness, psychological inflexibility and difficulties with emotion regulation accounted for 18.4% of the variance in problematic internet gaming, F (3, 108) = 8.13, p = .0001. Moreover, psychological inflexibility (95% CI [LL .03; UL .27]) but not difficulties with emotion regulation (95% CI [LL -.13; UL .11]) mediated the loneliness-problematic internet gaming relationship.Similar results were found for the anxiety and depression models. These findings suggest that psychological inflexibility serves as a possible dysfunctional process/mechanism through which psychologically distressed individuals engage in experiential avoidance, cognitive fusion and a lack of valued driven behavior which renders them vulnerable to develop maladaptive internet gaming behaviors. Theoretical and clinical implications of the findings are discussed to inform efforts to classify, prevent and treat excessive gaming behavior.
