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Enjoying video video games is a ceremony of passage for a lot of adolescents, however for some, it is also step one to a gaming dependancy.
“A number one concern for parents of children and teenagers is how much screen time and how much gaming is enough gaming and how to figure out where to draw the line,” mentioned John Foxe, Ph.D., director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience on the College of Rochester and co-author of a examine revealed within the Journal of Behavioral Addictions that found a key marker within the mind of teenagers who develop gaming dependancy signs. “These data begin to give us some answers.”
Researchers checked out knowledge collected from 6,143 recognized online game customers ages 10–15 over 4 years. Within the first yr, researchers took mind scans utilizing an fMRI as contributors accomplished the duty of pushing a button quick sufficient to obtain a $5 reward. Researchers subsequently had the identical contributors reply Video Sport Dependancy Questionnaires over the subsequent three years.
They discovered that the contributors with extra signs of gaming dependancy over time confirmed decrease mind exercise within the area concerned in decision-making and reward processing in the course of the preliminary mind scan taken 4 years earlier.
Earlier analysis in adults has offered related perception, displaying that this blunted response to reward anticipation is related to increased signs of gaming dependancy and means that decreased sensitivity to rewards, specifically non-gaming rewards, could play a job in problematic gaming.
“Gaming itself is not unhealthy, but there is a line, and our study clearly shows that some people are more susceptible to symptoms of gaming addiction than others,” mentioned Daniel Lopez, Ph.D, a postdoctoral fellow on the Developmental Mind Imaging Lab at Oregon Well being & Science College and first writer of the examine.
“I think for parents, that’s really key because you could restrict children entirely from gaming, but that’s going to be really, really difficult and crucial to their development as well as their social development. But we want to know the right balance between healthy gaming and unhealthy gaming, and this research starts to point us in the direction of the neural markers we can use to help us identify who might be at risk of unhealthy gaming behaviors.”
Longitudinal examine is remodeling teen mind well being
The info used on this analysis got here from the Adolescent Mind Cognitive Growth (ABCD) Research. Launched in 2015, the ABCD Research follows a cohort of 11,878 youngsters from pre-adolescence to maturity to create baseline requirements of mind growth.
The open-source knowledge mannequin has allowed researchers nationwide to make clear varied sides of social, emotional, cognitive, and bodily growth throughout adolescence. The College of Rochester joined the examine in 2017 and is one in every of 21 websites accumulating this knowledge from practically 340 contributors. Ed Freedman, Ph.D., professor of Neuroscience on the College and co-principal investigator of the college examine website, led this latest analysis on gaming.
“The large data set that contains this understudied developmental window is transforming recommendations for everything from sleep to screen time. And now we have specific brain regions that are associated with gaming addiction in teens,” Freedman mentioned.
“This allows us to ask other questions that may help us understand if there are ways to identify at-risk kids and if there are other behaviors or recommendations that could mitigate risk.”
“We’re very proud that this Rochester cohort is a part of this national and international dialogue around adolescent health,” mentioned Foxe, who can be a co-PI on the ABCD Research in Rochester. “We have already seen how this data, including the data gathered here from our community, is having a major impact on policy across the world.”
Extra data:
Daniel A. Lopez et al, The longitudinal affiliation between reward processing and signs of online game dependancy within the Adolescent Mind Cognitive Growth Research, Journal of Behavioral Addictions (2024). DOI: 10.1556/2006.2024.00068
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Mind scans present vulnerability to gaming dependancy in teenagers (2024, December 10)
retrieved 10 December 2024
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