The Neural Mechanism Of Emotion Regulation In People With Internet Gaming Disorder

With the development of Internet games,Internet gaming disorder(IGD)has also attracted a lot of attention and discussion of researchers.IGD refers to behaviors of excessive or uncontrollable indulgence in Internet games despite clearly understanding the negative effects of gaming behaviors.This disorder could cause a series of functional impairments,such as social,financial,occupational,and behavioral difficulties.In previous addictive studies,we found that emotion dysregulation is closely related with addictive behaviors and plays an essential role in addictive behaviors.Though abundant studies focus on the relationship between the IGD and emotion dysregulation,the relationship between them has remained elusive.Specifically,previous studies have mostly used behavioral data such as self-report to analyzed the effect of emotion regulation,which cannot effectively explain the regulation process and lack more accurate and objective evidence to confirmed the abnormal emotion regulation of IGD individuals.The present study focuses on the changes of cognitive neural activities in the process of emotion regulation of IGD participants,to explore the cognitive neural activity patterns related to emotion regulation of IGD,and to provide new perspectives and neural evidence for prevention and intervention of IGD.We first recruited 24 IGD participants and 26 recreational game user(RGU)participants(control group),and performed f MRI scans while they completed the general emotion regulation task to compare the Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent(BOLD)signal of the two groups in the emotion regulation process,and took the surviving brain regions as the regions of interest(ROI)to perform generalized psychophysiological interactions(gPPI)analyses to compare the functional connectivity differences between the two groups in the emotion regulation process.Subsequently,we recruited 21 IGD participants and 23 RGU participants,and asked them to complete the craving regulation task.We also to compare the BOLD signal of the two groups in the craving regulation process and functional connectivity signals of the surviving brain regions in the regulation process of the two groups.According to the above research data,we found that higher activation in the left dorsal anterior cingulate cortex(dACC),right ventral ACC,left claustrum and bilateral insula was observed in participants with IGD during general negative emotion reappraisal relative to that of the RGU participants.In addition,gPPI analysis also showed that IGD participants had stronger functional connectivity between the right insula and bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex(DLPFC)than the RGU participants.In addition,compared to RGUs,IGD participants showed enhanced brain activation in the right ACC,posterior cingulate cortex(PCC),orbitofrontal cortex(OFC)and middle temporal gyrus and in the left DLPFC and thalamus during the regulation of craving task.gPPI analysis revealed that IGD participants showed decreased functional connectivity between the right PCC and right inferior parietal lobule(IPL)compared to that in RGU participants.We have the following conclusions: first,compared to the RGU participants,IGD participants could not down-regulate their negative emotional experiences as efficiently as the RGU participants,although they engaged more cognitive resources.Second,IGD participants indulged in their current craving and need to engage more effort in downregulating their cravings.At the same time,the impairment of the control network is also an important reason that IGD individuals fail to regulate their cravings.In conclusion,IGD participants has a special neural response pattern both in regulating general negative emotions and special game cravings,which is mainly manifested in the increased activation of brain regions related to executive control(including DLPFC and ACC)and brain regions related to emotional information processing(including insula,thalamus,OFC).This indicated that the regulation process of IGD participants is more difficult than that of RGUs,so game maybe a more convenient regulation method for them.Future research can use this as a starting point to design specific treatment programs for emotional dysregulation of IGD,and provide targeted guidance.In addition,these findings suggest a biological mechanism for IGD that may help in finding potential interventions.