Presenting a Structural Model of Online Game Addiction in High School Students Based on Cognitive Distortion and Social Anxiety with the Mediating Role of Difficulties in Emotion Regulation

This research was conducted with the aim ofproviding a structural model of online game addiction insecond year high school students based on cognitive distortionand social anxiety with a mediating role of difficulty inregulating emotion.

The cross-sectional research methodis correlational. The statistical population of this research wasmade up of all secondary school students in Tehran in 1402-1401. The minimum sample size in structural equations is 200people, so 400 students were selected by staged clustersampling method. In this research, among the tools ofaddiction to online games (Wang and Chang, 2002), cognitivedistortion (Abdollahzadeh and Salar, 2000), adolescent socialanxiety (Paklek, 1997), difficulty It was used in emotionalregulation (Gratz and Romer, 2004). In order to analyze thedata, SPSS-V23 and Lisrel-V8.7 software were used. Also, inorder to respond to the research hypotheses, structuralequation modeling was used.

The results indicated that cognitive distortion,social anxiety and difficulty in regulating emotions have adirect effect on online game addiction. Also, the resultsshowed that cognitive distortion and social anxiety have anindirect effect on addiction to online games.

Since cognitive distortion, social anxiety anddifficulty in emotional regulation can play an effective role inaddiction to online games, it is necessary for schools and othereducational organizations to design and implementappropriate monitoring and control programs for this commonproblem, considering these variables.