Investigation of Emotion Characters of Internet Abusers Using Psychophysiological Signals

Abstract

Because of ubiquitous Internet and devices, the numbers of the Internet users rapidly increase. Internet addiction (IA) is also a fast growing, serious, and unavoidable problem around the world. The fifth version of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders suggested that IA should be studied in a scientific manner, and more related data must be acquired. Emotion was one important character of IA, and emotion-related syndrome was also reported in these years. IA contains psychological and physiological features and usually is assessed by IA scales. However, self-reporting scale is a subjective measurement tool that may be biased. Furthermore, scales or questionnaires assess the long-term developed states of IA rather than the developing states of IA or shortterm change. The physiological signals of IA abusers can provide objective, short-term, dynamic change information instead. Therefore, the dynamic physiological regulation and the psychological and physiological responses to emotion of IA abusers, particularly respiration and respiratory sinus arrhythmia, were studied. IA abusers tended to perform thoracic movement for emotion regulation, whereas people without IA tended to perform abdominal movement. IA abusers exhibited stronger RSA reactivity following negative emotion, but exhibited weaker RSA reactivity following positive emotion.