The Effect Of Aerobic Exercise On The Negative Cognitive Bias Of Social Network Addicts

Social network addiction refers to the behavior caused by addiction to social network use,which causes problems in life or has adverse effects on physical and mental health.Exploring the antecedents of social network addiction is an important way to understand the occurrence and development mechanism of the addiction behavior,and is also the premise of implementing targeted intervention measures.Negative emotions and low cognitive control have long been considered predisposition factors for substance and behavioral addiction.At present,researchers have investigated the cognitive control characteristics of social network addicts and its role in the occurrence of addictive behaviors,and achieved some results,but relatively little attention has been paid to the emotional cognitive characteristics of addicts.Both theoretical and empirical studies have shown that negative cognitive bias is not only the cognitive basis for the occurrence and maintenance of negative emotions,but also a risk factor for social network addiction,which affects the physical and mental development of addicts and hinders the recovery of addictive behaviors.Therefore,paying attention to the negative cognitive bias of social network addicts and taking effective intervention measures will have positive significance for the withdrawal of this addictive behavior.Due to some restrictive factors in the existing intervention methods for negative cognitive bias,finding effective intervention methods is still an important problem to be solved in current research.At present,aerobic exercise as a widely used intervention has achieved good results in practice,and is conducive to the improvement of negative cognitive bias.Therefore,this study examined the effect of aerobic exercise on negative cognitive bias of social network addicts,and examined the positive effects of acute and prolonged aerobic exercise of different intensities.Study 1 consisted of 3 experiments which explored the characteristics of negative cognitive bias in different aspects of social network addicts.Experiment 1 examined the negative attention bias of social network addicts.The results showed that the average response time of addicted subjects to negative faces was significantly shorter than that of neutral faces under effective conditions.The mean response time to the negative face was significantly longer than that to the neutral face in the null condition.This indicates that social network addiction subjects have an attentional bias towards negative faces,which is manifested in two components: attentional vigilance and detachment difficulty.In experiment 2,the memory bias of social network addicts was investigated.The results showed that the addicted subjects retained significantly more negative words than the healthy subjects.The retention of positive words was significantly lower than that of healthy subjects,indicating that addicted subjects had a memory bias towards negative words.Experiment3 tested the interpretive bias of social network addicts.The results showed that the addicted subjects had significantly more negative interpretations of fuzzy situations than the healthy subjects,and the negative interpretive bias index calculated based on reaction time was also significantly higher than the healthy subjects.The number of positive explanations and the bias index of addicted subjects to fuzzy situation were lower than that of healthy subjects,which indicated that addicted subjects had a bias to explain fuzzy situation.Study 2 consisted of three experiments that investigated the effects of different intensities of acute aerobic exercise on attention,memory,and interpretive bias in social network addicts.The results of experiment 4 showed that after moderate intensity and low intensity acute aerobic exercise,the mood state of social network addicts,attention alertness to negative faces and detachment difficulty levels were significantly decreased compared with the control group.The results of experiment 5 showed that,compared with the control group,medium and low intensity acute aerobic exercise could significantly reduce the retention amount of negative words and increase the retention amount of positive words for social network addicts.The results of experiment 6 showed that low-intensity aerobic exercise could not effectively improve the negative explanatory bias of social network addicts,and only moderate intensity aerobic exercise reduced the acceptance rate of negative interpretation and negative explanatory bias index of addicted subjects,while increasing the positive explanatory bias index of this group.None of the three experiments in this study detected the significant enhancement effect of highintensity aerobic exercise on the negative cognitive bias of social network addicts,and in the high-intensity aerobic exercise group of the three experiments,the attrition rate of subjects was relatively high(about 20%).Study 3 also included three experiments that examined the effects of 8weeks of moderate-intensity and low-intensity long-term aerobic exercise on attention,memory,and interpretive bias in social network addicts,as well as the continuation effects one month after the exercise ended(pre-test,post-test,and retest measures were administered).In experiment 7,compared with the pre-test,both moderate and low-intensity long-term aerobic exercise effectively reduced the level of attentional alertness and detachment difficulty of social network addicts to negative faces.The results of experiment 8 showed that,compared with the pre-test,both intensity of long-term aerobic exercise effectively reduced the amount of social network addicts’ retention of negative words and increased the amount of positive words.The results of experiment 9showed that,compared with the pre-test,both medium-intensity and lowintensity long-term aerobic exercise could significantly reduce the proportion of negative interpretation and negative interpretation bias index of social network addicts in fuzzy situations,and increase the proportion of positive interpretation and positive interpretation bias index.In the above three experiments,there was no significant difference between the positive effects of moderate and low intensity aerobic exercise(posttest).The results of post-test and retest showed that there were no significant changes in the positive effects of the two intensities of long-term aerobic exercise on the addicts with different cognitive biases.There was also no significant difference between the retest results of different intensity exercises.In conclusion,social network addicts have attention,memory and interpretation bias to negative information.Acute aerobic exercise of different intensity had a selective positive effect on these cognitive biases,while longterm aerobic exercise of moderate and low intensity for 8 weeks could comprehensively improve the negative cognitive biases of addicts,and these positive effects had a lasting effect within one month.This suggests that aerobic exercise can be used as an intervention method for negative cognitive bias of social network addicts,which is of great significance for the withdrawal of social network addiction behaviors.