Internet Use,Identity And Adolescents' Mental Health

The internet has been penetrating into almost every part of our life, affecting the society and everybody, comprehensively and greatly, especially for adolescents, who are at the critical stage of their lives. This phenomenon has brought on a lot of psychological researches on the relations between adolescents' internet use and their mental health. However, because of the high complexity of the objects researched and many other factors, many researchers have got opposite results, even the results of the same researchers at different stages are self-contradicted.At the same time, theories and researches pointed out: the sense of identity is one aspect of the optimal mental function and because of its function, identity can influence adolescents' mental health; there are positive correlation between identity and mental health. Furthermore, past researches also found because of the intention, time and involvement of internet use, internet use' influences on adolescents' mental health are different.Based on the above theories and research results, this research inferred that the causations which result in different internet use' influences on adolescents' mental health may exist in the following two facets. On the one Hand, internet use' influences on adolescents' mental health may be modulated by identity. On the other hand, different intentions, time and involvement of internet use may make different influences on adolescents' mental health.Using the way of questionnaire survey, taking 359 adolescent internet users respectively coming from middle school, high school and professional high school as subjects, this research discussed the alternant relations among adolescents' internet use, identity and mental health. The results are: the age and time of internet use can significantly predict the involvement of internet use; the involvement of internet use can negatively and significantly predict identity of internet users; the involvement of internet use can directly and negatively predict the facet of general well-being in mental health, but it can primarily negatively predict mental health indirectly via identity; identity can negatively and significantly predict the involvement of internet use so as to weaken its negative prediction to adolescents' mental health; entertainment-intention internet use has the most powerful and comprehensive negative influences on adolescents' mental health, sociality-intention internet use just has negative influences on some facets of adolescents' mentalhealth, and instrument-intention internet use has no negative influences.