Reciprocal Relationship Between Self-Control Belief and Gaming Disorder in Children and Adolescents: Longitudinal Survey Study.

Background: Children and adolescents are often at the crossroads of leisure gaming and excessive gaming. It is essential to identify the modifiable psychosocial factors influencing gaming disorder development. The lay theories of self-control (ie, the beliefs about whether self-control can be improved, also called self-control mindsets) may interplay with self-control and gaming disorder and serve as a promising influential factor for gaming disorder.

Objective: This study aims to answer the research questions "Does believing one's self-control is unchangeable predict more severe gaming disorder symptoms later?" and "Does the severity of gaming disorder symptoms prospectively predict self-control mindsets?" with a 1-year, 2-wave, school-based longitudinal survey.

Methods: A total of 3264 students (338 in grades 4-5 and 2926 in grades 7-10) from 15 schools in Hong Kong participated in the classroom surveys. We used cross-lagged panel models to examine the direction of the longitudinal association between self-control mindsets and gaming disorder.

Results: A bidirectional relationship was found between self-control mindsets and gaming disorder symptom severity (the cross-lagged path from mindsets to gaming disorder: regression coefficients [b] with 95% CI [0.070, 0.020-0.12o, P=.006]; and from gaming disorder to mindsets: b with 95% CI [0.11, 0.060-0.160, P<.001]). Subgroup analyses of boy and girl participants revealed that more growth mindsets regarding self-control predicted less severe gaming disorder symptoms in girls (b=0.12, 95% CI 0.053-0.190, P=.001) but not in boys (b=0.025, 95% CI -0.050 to 0.100, P=.51), while more severe gaming disorder symptoms predicted a more fixed mindset of self-control in both boys (b=0.15, 95% CI 0.069-0.230, P<.001) and girls (b=0.098, 95% CI 0.031-0.170, P=.004) after 1 year.

Conclusions: Our findings demonstrated the negative impact of gaming disorder on one's self-control malleability beliefs and implied that promoting a growth mindset regarding self-control might be a promising strategy for gaming disorder prevention and early intervention, especially for girls.