Peer-Reviewed Study

Reciprocal Relationship Between Depression and Internet Gaming Disorder in Children: A 12-Month Follow-up of the iCURE Study Using Cross-Lagged Path Analysis

Dec 2019 🇰🇷 Journal of Behavioral Addictions PEER-REVIEWED

Published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions, this iCURE-cohort paper by Hyunsuk Jeong, Hae Kook Lee, and colleagues followed 366 Korean elementary-school internet users for a year to test which comes first: depressive symptoms or gaming-disorder-associated behavior. Using cross-lagged statistical modeling, the authors report a two-way association — children with more depressive symptoms at the start tended to show more severe gaming-disorder-associated features a year later, and children with more severe gaming-disorder-associated features at the start tended to show more depressive symptoms a year later. Neither path was dramatically larger than the other. The authors suggest the two are linked in a reinforcing loop rather than one simply causing the other, and argue that programs addressing children's gaming habits should also screen for mood symptoms, and vice versa. TechKids Foundation cites this as evidence that gaming-related risk and depression in children are best understood together.

Depression → later gaming-disorder severity: β = 0.15 (p = .003)

In cross-lagged modeling of 366 Korean elementary-school children over 12 months, higher baseline depressive symptoms predicted more severe internet-gaming-disorder-associated features at follow-up.

Gaming-disorder severity → later depression: β = 0.11 (p = .018)

The reverse path was also significant: more severe baseline gaming-disorder-associated features predicted higher depressive symptoms a year later, indicating a two-way association rather than a single-direction cause.

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CITATION

Jeong, Hyunsuk, Hyeon Woo Yim, Seung-Yup Lee, Hae Kook Lee, Marc N. Potenza, Sun-Jin Jo, and Hye Jung Son. "Reciprocal Relationship Between Depression and Internet Gaming Disorder in Children: A 12-Month Follow-up of the iCURE Study Using Cross-Lagged Path Analysis." Journal of Behavioral Addictions 8, no. 4 (2019): 725–732. https://doi.org/10.1556/2006.8.2019.74

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