Researchers have pinpointed a brain marker that could predict gaming addiction in adolescents, offering a new tool for parents and policymakers in managing screen time healthily and effectively.
Playing video games is a common pastime for many adolescents, but for some, it could be the first step toward a gaming addiction. A newly published study in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions has revealed a crucial brain marker that may predict which teens are most at risk for developing such addictive behaviors.
“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,” co-author John Foxe, a professor and research director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester, said in a news release. “These data begin to give us some answers.”
The study examined data collected from 6,143 adolescents aged 10-15 over four years. Initial brain scans were taken using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while participants were engaged in a task involving a financial reward. The researchers also administered Video Game Addiction Questionnaires to the same participants over the next three years.
They discovered that those who exhibited more symptoms of gaming addiction had shown lower brain activity in areas related to decision-making and reward processing during their initial scans.
These findings are consistent with past research in adults, which demonstrated that a diminished response to reward anticipation correlates with heightened symptoms of gaming addiction. This suggests that a reduced sensitivity to rewards, particularly non-gaming ones, might contribute to problematic gaming behaviors.
“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,” first author Daniel Lopez, a postdoctoral fellow at the Developmental Brain Imaging Lab at Oregon Health & Science University, said in the news release. “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.”
Transforming Teen Brain Health
The findings are part of the larger Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, which launched in 2015 to follow a cohort of 11,878 children from pre-adolescence into adulthood, aiming to establish baseline standards for brain development. This open-source data model has enabled researchers around the country to explore various aspects of social, emotional, cognitive and physical development during adolescence.
“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,” added Ed Freedman, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Rochester and co-principal investigator of the university’s ABCD study site. “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.”
Foxe, who’s also a co-principal investigator of the university’s ABCD study site, also emphasized the global significance of the Rochester cohort’s contributions to this research.
“We’re very proud that this Rochester cohort is a part of this national and international dialogue around adolescent health,” Foxe added. “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.”
As more findings emerge from the ABCD Study, researchers hope to develop better strategies for identifying and supporting at-risk teens, promoting healthier development during these critical years.