Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China.
Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality, Ministry of Education, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Dec 5;19(23):16264. doi: 10.3390/ijerph192316264.
Gaming disorder (GD) may impair executive functions such as response inhibition. According to the tripartite neurocognitive model, the interoceptive system generates a state of craving that exacerbates the dysfunction of GD. We speculate that emotional information may play an important role in the mechanism, which leads to impaired response inhibition in people with GD.
A three-factor mixed experimental design was adopted in this go/nogo task. The between-subject factor was group (GD or control group), and the within-subject factors were two types of emotional information, task relevance (related or unrelated) and emotional valence (negative or positive).
The GD group had lower nogo accuracies than the control group in the task-unrelated condition and also in the negative condition. Parallelly, the GD group showed faster reactions and lower accuracy in the go trials than the control group under task-unrelated negative conditions. At the neural level, the GD group had smaller amplitudes of nogo-N2 and larger amplitudes of nogo-P3 than the control group in the task-unrelated condition.
The findings prove the hypothesis of this study that emotional information could be a factor leading to impaired response inhibition in GD individuals. The response inhibition abilities of GD are weakened when processing task-unrelated or negative information, which may be caused by failure of behavioral inhibition and weakened conflict control, resulting in more cognitive resources to complete response suppression under specific conditions. This study provides evidence for weaker response inhibition in GD individuals from the perspective of cognitive-emotional interaction and provides more detailed information for interventions for GD.
游戏障碍（GD）可能会损害反应抑制等执行功能。根据三分神经认知模型，内感受系统产生一种渴望状态，从而加剧 GD 的功能障碍。我们推测，情绪信息可能在机制中发挥重要作用，导致 GD 患者的反应抑制受损。
本 Go/Nogo 任务采用三因素混合实验设计。被试间因素为组（GD 或对照组），被试内因素为两种情绪信息，任务相关性（相关或不相关）和情绪效价（负性或正性）。
GD 组在任务不相关条件和负性条件下的 Nogo 准确率均低于对照组。平行地，在任务不相关负性条件下，GD 组的 Go 试验反应更快，准确率更低。在神经水平上，GD 组在任务不相关条件下的 Nogo-N2 振幅较小，Nogo-P3 振幅较大。
这些发现证明了本研究的假设，即情绪信息可能是导致 GD 个体反应抑制受损的一个因素。当处理任务不相关或负性信息时，GD 的反应抑制能力减弱，这可能是由于行为抑制失败和冲突控制减弱，导致在特定条件下需要更多的认知资源来完成反应抑制。本研究从认知-情绪相互作用的角度为 GD 个体的反应抑制较弱提供了证据，并为 GD 的干预提供了更详细的信息。
