Dysfunctional cognitive control and reward processing in adolescents with Internet gaming disorder

Abstract

Internet gaming disorder (IGD), which involves unhealthy and excessive Internet use, has been a global problem since the recent development of the Internet. IGD may lead to serious impairments in psychological and social functioning, such as anxiety, reductions in academic and occupational performance, and even suicidal behaviors (Petry, Rehbein, Ko, & O'Brien, 2015). Because of its clinically significant harmfulness, IGD has been included in the appendix of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed., DSM-5). Thus, there is a need for the further exploration of IGD's clinical relevance and underlying neural mechanisms. Various neurobiological hypotheses have been postulated to explain why adolescence is the peak period of IGD and

Neural Dynamic Responses of Monetary and Social Reward Processes in Adolescents

“…Rewards can induce intense emotional experiences in adolescents (Ernst et al, 2006;Galvan et al, 2006;Crone and Dahl, 2012;Blakemore and Mills, 2014;Gilbert et al, 2019;, and their motivation toward rewards is an important part of socialization (Kohls et al, 2011;Jia et al, 2013). Abnormal reward process development has been widely seen in children and adolescents with depression (Bress et al, 2015;Luking et al, 2016), autism spectrum disorder (Cox et al, 2015), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (Gonzalez-Gadea et al, 2016), and some other conduct behaviors (Sheffield et al, 2015;Li et al, 2020).…”

Neural correlates of response inhibition and performance monitoring in binge watching

“…This pattern of normal conflict detection and hyperactive response inhibition does not dovetail with inhibition dynamics previously observed in other addictive or excessive behaviors. Whereas internet gaming has also been reported to show unaltered conflict detection (N2; Kim et al, 2017;Li et al, 2019;Littel et al, 2012), response inhibition (P3) was either reduced (Li et al, 2019) or unchanged (Kim et al, 2017;Littel et al, 2012). Similarly, whereas one study also found increased P3 in the absence of performance differences in excessive internet use and interpreted this finding to reflect cognitive effort when inhibiting successfully (Dong et al, 2010), excessive internet use was repeatedly associated with impaired conflict detection .…”

“…Response inhibition is commonly measured using go/nogo tasks, in which participants have to respond quickly to frequently occurring go stimuli but also have to suppress responses to rare nogo stimuli. Reduced nogo accuracy has been observed for internet gaming disorder and excessive internet use (Kim et al, 2017;Li et al, 2019;Littel et al, 2012;Zhou et al, 2010).…”

“…While the N2 is associated with conflict detection, the P3 complex is interpreted as a neural marker for actual motor inhibition: P3a is associated with attention and orientation and P3b with suppression of the former reaction (Enriquez-Geppert et al, 2010;Polich, 2007). Whereas substance use disorders seem to be quite robustly characterized by hypoactive neural correlates of response inhibition (for systematic review see Luijten et al, 2014), the evidence regarding alterations of N2 and P3 amplitudes in addictive behaviors is inconclusive: the N2 appears to be unaffected in internet gaming disorder (Kim et al, 2017;Li et al, 2019;Littel et al, 2012), but increased in excessive smartphone use (Chen et al, 2016;Gao et al, 2019), and reduced in excessive internet use (Dong et al, 2010;Zhou et al, 2010). The P3 was shown to be reduced in internet gaming disorder and excessive smartphone use (Gao et al, 2019;Li et al, 2019) but increased in excessive internet use (Dong et al, 2010).…”

“…Whereas substance use disorders seem to be quite robustly characterized by hypoactive neural correlates of response inhibition (for systematic review see Luijten et al, 2014), the evidence regarding alterations of N2 and P3 amplitudes in addictive behaviors is inconclusive: the N2 appears to be unaffected in internet gaming disorder (Kim et al, 2017;Li et al, 2019;Littel et al, 2012), but increased in excessive smartphone use (Chen et al, 2016;Gao et al, 2019), and reduced in excessive internet use (Dong et al, 2010;Zhou et al, 2010). The P3 was shown to be reduced in internet gaming disorder and excessive smartphone use (Gao et al, 2019;Li et al, 2019) but increased in excessive internet use (Dong et al, 2010). However, these P3 findings were neither replicated for internet gaming (Kim et al, 2017;Littel et al, 2012) nor excessive smartphone use (Chen et al, 2016).…”