Abstract

As more and more forms of technology have permeated society, questions have been raised regarding whether certain forms of technology might be “addictive” in nature. Yet, while research in this domain has greatly accelerated over the past decade, there remain a host of areas that are poorly explored or understood. The purpose of this special collection was thus not only to provide an outlet for work focused on the potential for behavioral addiction to technology, but perhaps more pertinently, to build stronger links across researchers focused on a similar topic, but through the lens of different forms of technology (e.g., social media, internet, video games).

Keywords: addiction, video games, social media, internet

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to C. Shawn Green, Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1202 West Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706, United States. Email: [email protected]

The massive increase in various types of technology-mediated interactions—whether in the form of video game play, internet browsing, social media use, online shopping, or myriad others—has resulted in significant public and scientific interest in the extent to which some of these interactions may be pathological or “addictive” in nature. Indeed, there is a large and growing body of empirical work indicating that at least some individuals show both dysfunction (i.e., disruptions in normal life) and distress (either felt by themselves or those around them) as a consequence of their interactions with various forms of technology.

However, given the relative infancy of scientific study in these domains, a host of areas remain poorly or not at all explored or understood, ranging from basic issues in categorizing experiences (e.g., how to divide the space of human–technology interactions, whether the experience of interest should be categorized differently if it involves technology, rather than is in-person), in measurement and assessment (e.g., scale development, validity, whether symptoms should be weighted by severity, how/whether to draw binary lines of pathological/not pathological), in potential comorbidities (either across forms of technology or with various recognized psychological or medical disorders), in individual difference factors that are potentially protective or that suggest additional risk, in biological/neural underpinnings, and in possible treatments, to name just a few.

The purpose of the special collection on “Behavioral Addiction to Technology” was thus to provide a home for research exploring any aspect of technology-mediated interaction and its relationship with “addiction.” The one major constraint that was put on author teams was to ensure that, although the research would obviously be set in a particular time with a particular set of human–technology interactions available (e.g., certain popular social media sites designed in particular ways; certain popular video games), the questions and methods needed to be designed in such a way that they spoke to persistent issues related to the human mind and behavior (i.e., both build upon previous theory and empirical results and have the potential to be built upon in future work).

The research published in this special collection is thus fully consistent with the broad scope of Technology, Mind, and Behavior, touching upon many key issues related to social media use, video games, internet use, and screen time, among others. This includes, for instance, new methods to measure behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that are consistent with behavioral addictions and that are tied specifically to different forms of technology, how parental rules around media use and/or the particular content of certain types of media are associated with problematic media use in children, factors that are related to the recovery from gaming disorder, and how both self-monitoring behaviors and the stated desire to reduce internet/social media use are associated with well-being.

Copyright © The Author(s) 2024

Received August 23, 2024
Accepted August 26, 2024