Psychological and Social Implications Surrounding Internet and Gaming Addiction

Citing internet and gaming addictions as producing similar problems as other forms of addiction, such as relationship impairment, disturbed sleep, reduced ability to work, Bishop prefers the more general term “digital addiction” as helpful in separating the wheat from the chaff in regard to the variety of ideas that address this subject. He aims to bring up to date the research into internet and gaming addiction in order to devise new methods to solve the problems that arise from prolonged overuse of internet-connected and other gaming devices. Fourteen chapters are divided into four sections: diagnostic criteria in the context of DSM-5; psychology and behavior change; theory and methods; public policy issues. Fourteen chapters are: internet gaming disorder; new concepts, old known issues; determining the risk of digital addiction to adolescent targets of internet trolling; dangers of playing with the virtual other in mind; avoiding adverse consequences from digital addiction and retaliatory feedback; “I can’t do it by myself”; cyber-stalking or just plain talking?; a theoretical model, including user-experience, aesthetics, and psychology, in the 3D design process; using “on-the-fly corpus linguistics” to systematically derive word definitions using inductive abstraction and reductionist correlation analysis; the association between internet addiction and psychosocial variables; the impacts of alcohol on e-dating activity; consulting the British public in the digital age; responsible gambling laws’ contributions to behavior change in problem gamblers in online poker; the games people play. Annotation c2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)