BACKGROUND Children and adolescents are often at the crossroads of leisure gaming and excessive gaming. The lay theories of self-control (i.e., the belief about whether self-control can be improved, also called self-control mindset) may interplay with self-control and gaming disorder. OBJECTIVE This is a pioneer study to examine the longitudinal associations between self-control mindset and the severity of gaming disorder symptoms with a one-year, two-wave, school-based longitudinal survey. METHODS A total of 3,264 students (338 in Grades 4-5 and 2,926 in Grades 7-10) from 15 schools in Hong Kong participated in the classroom surveys. We employed 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. Subgroup analyses of boy and girl participants revealed that growth mindsets regarding self-control predicted less severe gaming disorder symptoms in girls but not in boys, while more severe gaming disorder symptoms predicted a more fixed mindset of self-control in both boys and girls after one year. CONCLUSIONS Our findings demonstrated the negative impact of gaming disorder on one’s self-control belief and also implied that promoting a growth mindset regarding self-control is a promising strategy for gaming disorder prevention and early intervention, especially for girls.
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Zhu et al. (2024) studied this question.