The Effect of Negative Automatic Thoughts and Self-esteem on the Addiction Potential in Male Students

Adolescence is one of the important stages of life, with widespread physical and cognitive changes happening in this period, one of these is the subject of addiction potential. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to predict addiction potential based on negative automatic thoughts and self-esteem in the boy students. The research design was descriptive-correlational study. The study population consisted of all male high school students in Mashhad in the 2015-2016 academic year. The sample consisted of 480 students selected by the convenience sampling method. The measurement tools were the Kendall and Hollon Negative Automatic Thoughts questionnaire, the Eysenck Self-esteem questionnaire, and the Wade and colleagues Addiction Potential questionnaire. To analyze the relationships among the variables and to predict variances in addiction potential, the correlation tests and the stepwise regression analysis were used. The results showed that there was a significant and positive relationship between the negative automatic thoughts and addiction potential (P<0.001) and there was a significant and negative relationship between the self-esteem and addiction potential (P<0.001). Also, the results of regression analysis showed that the negative automatic thoughts and self-esteem were able to significantly predict addiction potential (P<0.001).