The Study Of Internet Addicts’ Craving For Internet

Internet is playing an more and more important role in our daily life. At the end of December2013, the scale of Chinese internet users has reached618million, and the penetration rateof internet has reached45.8%; the average time of Chinese internet users spend on internet has reached25hours per week at2013. However, with the popularity of internet, its negative effects are becoming increasingly prominent, especially the negative impacts of excessive indulgence in using internet(Internet addiction) concern to researchers and conducted a lot of researches. There are many behavioral and psychological similarities between Internet addiction and such traditional addictios as drug addiction and gambling addiction, but whether they share same mechanism is still controversial.Craving is one of the core features of addictive disorders. Psychological craving refers to the impulse to conduct addictive behavior that one can’t restrain, it is a subjective motivational state or a subjective desire or experience that individuals want to repeat addictive behaviors again, and it is one of the core issues that researchers concerned. The researches on substance addictions (smoking, alcoholism, drug addiction) and non-material (gambling addiction) have shown that craving is an important factor in the maintenance and withdrawal failure of addictive behavior. Through three studies, this research aims to explore the factors influencing the Internet addicts’craving for internet, and learn about the formation and maintain mechanism internet addiction and its relation to and other addictive disorders, and points out theoretical basis and practical guidance for the interventions of Internet addiction.Study1screened18pathological usersand20normal network users as subjects using "Youth Pathological Internet Use Scale" and Young’s "Internet Addiction Questionnaire", uesd12words closely related to internet and12words relatively non-related internet as experimental materials, and use "clues exposure paradigm" of two (addiction/normal use)×cue type2(network-related/neutral) study design, the results showed that: the main effect of group and clue type both were significant, and the interaction of interaction is also significant; namely compared with the neutral stimulus, internet-related stimuli can significantly induced a craving for internet; compared with the normal user, Internet-addints’ craving were more tense, the intensity of craving evoked by internet-related stimuli was significantly higher in Internet-addints than in the normal network users, namely at the cognitive processing level above threshold, internet-related stimuli could ignificantly induced a craving for internet.Study2investigated this effect at the the cognitive processing level below threshold on the basis of study1. Study2use the same experiment design, research materials and experimental procedures as study1(the presentation time of stimulus is set to25ms to guarantee that the cognitive processing is belowcthreshold level). The results of group2(addiction/normal use)×cue type2(network-related/neutral) design showed that: the main effect of the group and clues type is significant., namely, at the cognitive processing level of below threshold, internet-related stimuli can induce significant craving for internet.Study3took30Internet-addicts as subjects, use the "paradigm of public speaking" as a stress-induced scenario and "clues exposure paradigm" to measure the craving for internet. The results showed that: in the group of Internet-addicts, there existed a significant difference between the stress group and non-stress group on the level of craving for internet, the craving of syress group was higher than non-stress group; the result of regression analysis found that perceived stress can significantly predict the level of one’ s craving for internet.Finally, the limitations of the present research were discussed; the future directions, theoretical implications and practical value of this paper were provided.