What´s Pathological Addiction Or Self-Regulation?

One last key area of research that has appeared in relating self-regulation to video games, concerns that of pathological gaming or personal gaming addiction. Pathological gaming is often seen in much the same light as to how pathological gambling is viewed in the DSM, in the sense that they are viewed as a set of addictive behaviors (Liau et al., 2015a). This obviously presents a concern for a number of people who play video games, or parents who let their children play games, in hope that they do not develop an addiction to this activity. Two separate studies that were conducted, analyzed potential predictors as to what may cause a gamer to develop a pathological gaming habit, one investigating video games as a whole (Liau et al., 2015a),
In creating this survey, the already developed, Generalized Problematic Internet Use Scale 2 (Caplan, 2010), was altered to fit this study’s focus of game usage, with this paper focusing on two key aspect measures of this survey, those being mood regulation, and deficient self-regulation. In the found results, both deficient self-regulation and mood regulation showed predictive ability towards problematic online gaming, accounting for nearly 80% of the total variance in the results. Further compacting these results, deficient self-regulation appeared to be partly borne out of a preference in online interaction, as well as mood regulation being found as an occasional mediator between the two variables, in the sample. One last noteworthy result was that mood-regulation had predictive power in relation to deficient self-regulation, leading to problematic online gaming. This leads to my belief that a possible solution to avoid developing a habit of problematic or pathological internet gaming, would be for people who are at risk of pathological online gaming to find effective ways to regulate their moods and emotions in effective channels, before using online games (Haagsma et al.,
A few key points to specifically focus on is that violent video games have been demonstrated to have important relations to self-regulation, that has shown to have an immediate depletionary effect on people on cognitive tasks after gameplay. It also was found that violent video games can have positive effects on self-regulation, such as helping youth to be more adaptive to learning, as well as showing negative effects on behavioral regulation and pro-social behaviors. Exergaming has begun to become more expansive as technology has improved, and begun to implement self -regulative activities to try and promote exercise habits. However, it is questionable just how effective it works with a person’s self-regulation. Lastly, self-regulation has demonstrated to be both a negative mediator between traits as impulsiveness and predictive power in relation to developing pathological gaming tendencies. It also has demonstrated that strengthening a person’s self-regulation, specifically their emotional-regulation, it can serve as a protective factor from becoming a pathological gamer. Moving into potential future areas of research, one interesting area may be analyzing if games can include functions to directly improve a person’s