Study Finds, Too Much Screen Time May Be Linked To Poor Mental Health

Aug, 2022 - By WMR

Excessive video game addiction is detrimental to children's mental health, according to a recent study. Limiting screen time is necessary.

The Royal Society's paper claims that numerous people have issued warnings regarding the possible addictive qualities of video games. Their potential to negatively impact players' health could result in significant and divisive changes to health policy. The results suggest that playing video games probably doesn't have a significant enough effect on wellbeing to be both highly subjective noticeable and authoritatively different from zero. Only on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays is it permissible for children in China to play video games for an hour each day.

The new study, however, revealed little to no proof of a connection between gaming and wellbeing. The study surveyed 38,935 English-speaking gamers to correlate the number of hours spent playing games over the previous two weeks with participants' assessments of their mental health. Publishers of video games Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo provided the researchers with the number of hours each respondent spent playing video games with their consent. It conducted surveys every two weeks in keeping track of gamers of some video games over the course of six weeks.

More work was necessary to determine the causes' longer-term effects. Studies with both a larger implemented to allow resolution and a larger time overall range are needed since there may be more transitory or delayed affects. The short-term impact of playing video games on mental health is "probably too modest" to be observed. Despite the fact that the researchers examined the play and wellbeing of thousands of players across a range of games, they are only able to infer the causality of the associations that have been seen by informed estimates.