Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Serious Games
Date Submitted: Apr 12, 2024
Open Peer Review Period: Apr 16, 2024 - Jun 11, 2024
Date Accepted: Nov 1, 2024
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Self-Control Belief and Gaming Disorder: A Reciprocal Model and Gender Differences
ABSTRACT
Background:
Children and adolescents are often at the crossroads of leisure gaming and excessive gaming. The lay theories of self-control (i.e., the belief about whether self-control can be improved, also called self-control mindset) may interplay with self-control and gaming disorder.
Objective:
This is a pioneer study to examine the longitudinal associations between self-control mindset and the severity of gaming disorder symptoms with a one-year, two-wave, school-based longitudinal survey.
Methods:
A total of 3,264 students (338 in Grades 4-5 and 2,926 in Grades 7-10) from 15 schools in Hong Kong participated in the classroom surveys. We employed cross-lagged panel models to examine the direction of the longitudinal association between self-control mindsets and gaming disorder.
Results:
A bidirectional relationship was found between self-control mindsets and gaming disorder symptom severity. Subgroup analyses of boy and girl participants revealed that growth mindsets regarding self-control predicted less severe gaming disorder symptoms in girls but not in boys, while more severe gaming disorder symptoms predicted a more fixed mindset of self-control in both boys and girls after one year.
Conclusions:
Our findings demonstrated the negative impact of gaming disorder on one’s self-control belief and also implied that promoting a growth mindset regarding self-control is a promising strategy for gaming disorder prevention and early intervention, especially for girls.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.