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A Short Summary of Neuroscientific Findings on Internet Addiction

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Internet Addiction

Abstract

Neuroscientific approaches to the understanding of Internet addiction have broadened our knowledge on the biological basis related to the overuse of the Internet. The present chapter lends a short introduction to this area. Moreover, it integrates and summarizes the most important findings of this research field.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Of note, the numbers are just a rough (conservative) estimate on studies dealing with this research topic, because the inclusion of additional keywords (such as problematic Internet use) would have yielded higher results. Please see also our foreword for a short thought on the terminology.

  2. 2.

    The above mentioned studies by Ko et al. (2009) and Sun et al. (2012) reported a wide range of further brain areas of interest, which are not discussed at this point for the sake of brevity.

  3. 3.

    In the color word Stroop experiment, words describing colors are presented in two conditions. The congruent condition e.g. consists of the word blue presented in blue color, whereas in the incongruent condition the word blue is presented in red color. Participants are required to name the color of the shown words (i.e. not the word printed).

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Correspondence to Christian Montag .

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Montag, C., Duke, É., Reuter, M. (2015). A Short Summary of Neuroscientific Findings on Internet Addiction. In: Montag, C., Reuter, M. (eds) Internet Addiction. Studies in Neuroscience, Psychology and Behavioral Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07242-5_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07242-5_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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