Impact Of Different Risk Situations On Decision-Making Behaviors Of Internet Game Addicts

People make various decisions in their daily life.Risky decision is one of the most common types of decision,which usually refers to the decisions that are highly uncertain about the future.Researches have shown that an individual’s addiction status was closely connected to his/her performance of risky decision.In recent years,Internet games become a form of entertainment with the development of network technology.However,addicted in Internet games has many negative effects on people’s daily life.Compared with other types of addiction,Internet game addiction appears later,but the social impact is more extensive.The mainly reason is that Internet games are more and more available and popular.Researches focused on risky decision of Internet game addicts are benefit to clarify the behavioral patterns of the people who addicted in Internet game.The current study aimed to explore the risky decision of Internet game addicts in different risk situations from the perspective of behavioral and neural level.Our research included three experiments.The sequential risk taking task was used to investigate the characteristics of risky decision and the effect of different risk situations in Internet game addicts.Meanwhile,the brain activities in the task was also revealed.Experiment 1 explored the differences of risk taking tendency and emotional changes between Internet game group and control group.Experiment 2 manipulated the risk situation by changing the value of each decision to examine the effect of risk situations on the risk taking behavior and emotion of the two groups.Experiment 3 adopted event-related potential(ERP)technology to explore the brain activity of Internet game addicts’ decision-making behaviors in different risk situations from the time course and source localization.The behavioral results showed that the tendency of risk taking was higher in Internet game group than that in control group,and the Internet game group could not adjust their risky decision in different risk situations,while the control group could.Namely,the Internet game group showed no significant differences in risky decision between high-risk situation and low-risk situation,however,control group was more conservative in high-risk situation than that in low-risk situation.In terms of emotion,compared to control group,Internet game group was more relief in the context of gain and showed stronger emotional sensitivity.Moreover,Internet game group gained less coins in the task.ERP results showed that in the decision-making phase,the N2 component of the control group was more negative in high-risk situation than that in low-risk situation and the difference of source activations was mainly identified in the superior frontal gyrus(SFG),while the Internet game group showed no difference in different risk situations.In the feedback phase,specifically in gain results,the N2 component of the Internet game group was more negative.And the P3 component of the control group was more positive.The difference of source activations about N2 component was mainly identified in the superior parietal lobe(SPL).The difference of source activations about P3 component was mainly identified in the SPL and orbitofrontal cortex(OFC).The research investigated the effects of different risk situations on the risky decision of Internet game addicts and their brain activity.It found that the Internet game group had a higher tendency of risk-taking,and could not adjust their behavior according to different risk situations.In addition,in the decision-making phase,the ERP of the Internet game group under different risk situations were not significantly different,but there were differences on the N2 component of control group.The difference of source activations about N2 component in control group was mainly identified in the superior frontal gyrus.In the feedback phase,the N2 component in the Internet game group was more negative,while the P3 component in the control group was more positive.The difference of source activations between the two groups were mainly identified in the SPL and OFC.These findings could provide some inspiration and reference for the intervention of Internet game addiction from the aspect of risky decision.