A Study Of Attentional Bias To Internet Related Stimuli In Internet Addicts

Internet has played an increasingly important role in our real life and integrated into the life with its unique advantages all the time. Internet has brought a lot of changes to social life,it has a profound influence on people's lifestyles,psychology and behavior at the same time. The internet addicts obsess with the long-term network and can not extricate themselves. The emergence of various physical and psychological symptom brought study or daily life some troubles,and some even took the road of crime. All of this increasingly arouses the attention of public and researchers.Interne addiction is an interdisciplinary research field , which involves economics,brain science,medical,cognitive science,sociology and psychology,etc. The researchers have achieved some success on either the definition ,measurement and theory interpretation of internet addiction or the prevention and treatment by their efforts. Research on internet addiction is the more emerging areas of psychological study. Research in this area has also started shortly in our country.Most of previous researchers focus on the relations between internet addition and personality or psychological health by the only way of case study or questionnaire survey,while few of them have designed any strict experiments to study it. There are two kinds of addition, drug addition and behavioral addition. The research on internet addition has become an important area of behavioral addition. Based on the similar behavior mode between substance dependent and behavior dependent . The experiment paradigm aimed at substance dependent participants could be used to explored the cognition mechanism of internet addition participants. Attention is the first step in cognitive processes to make sure the external stimuli can be processed by the individuals, therefore attention to the role of cognitive bias has been the concern of many researchers. The study,from the view of internet additive tendency and the emergency of dot stimuli,explores different individuals'attention bias in order to discover the traits and the mechanism of attention bias. It will be meaningful to the prevention and treatment of internet addicts. It is hoped to rich the study results in this field.In experiment one,3×2mixed design is used. It is designed to learn the difference of the attentional bias by the way of"dot-probe task". The position of dot stimuli are classified by the dot stimuli which emerges in the same side of the objective words and in the different side as within-subject factors. The type of internet addictive tendency are classified by high internet addictive tendency group,low internet addictive tendency and people between them as between-subject factors.In experiment two, the experimental materials are presented by software E-prime as same as in experiment one. The second experiment employs masked version of the dot probe task to look into characteristics of preattentional bias. 2(the position of dot stimulus)×3(the type of internet addictive tendency)mixed design is used,the objective words are internet related stimuli,to evaluate the role of awareness,the word stimuli are presented briefly (14 msec) and masked. The data are analyzed by repeated measures.The results indicate that:(1)there is a significant difference between the RT of dot stimulus which emerges in the same side of the objective words and in the different side as within-subject factors. The high internet addictive tendency subjects have greater attention bias to the words related internet,the difference is significant. (2)There was no difference for the other subjects. When the subjective words are positive emotional experience or negative emotional experience,the differences are not significant. (3) high internet addictive tendency subjects indicates significant preattentive bias to the words related internet,the other individuals don't show significant preattentive bias.The innovative point of this study id that it employs masked version of the dot probe task to look into characteristics of preattentive bias. For further study, the excellent measurement tool should be prepared to carry out the subjects'identification and the true experimental situation should be presented.