Internet Addiction, Personality Traits and Emotion Regulation in Young Adults

Internet addiction is defined as an uncontrollable use of the internet or excessive preoccupation with an internet that cause impairment or distress (Shaw & Black, 2008). Since the late 1990s, as the consequences of overuse of the internet increased, it has been introduced as a mental disorder (Young, 1996). The present study aimed to investigate internet addiction in relation to emotion regulation and personality traits in a sample of 289 Iranian young adults to present a psychological model.MethodParticipants completed an online survey including the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS), Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ), Young’s Internet Addiction Test (IAT) and the NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) through a Google Docs’ link. Considering the subject of the study and the nature of the variables, it is possible to investigate the research hypotheses by presenting a conceptual model for the mediation analysis. The adjusted model was examined using Lisrel.Results Results suggested that neuroticism, agreeableness, and consciousness may be underlying factors in Internet addiction, with an indirect effect for openness to experience through the emotion regulation. Contrary to expectation, no effect has been reported for extroversion. On the other side, difficulties in emotion regulation could increase compulsive internet usage.Conclusions Based on the findings of the current study and some other researches it can be concluded that probably the most effective way of preventing internet addiction would be trying to improve positive emotion regulation’s skills during childhood, because prevention is better than cure. While the result of this study could contribute to our psychological understanding of the internet addiction, it could be integrated to other cognitive and neural correlates of the disorder in a cognitive neuroscientific model in further studies to add on our view to the subject.