A recent study reveals that kids who are hooked to video games or what they term pathological video gaming, end up having problems fitting with their peers. They also tend to be more impulsive compared with other children who are not addicted to video games.  Addicted video gamers are more prone to phobias, depression and anxiety aside from the fact that their grades in school also come low.

The proponents of the study cannot really point out whether the addiction to video gaming came first or is it the depression that started the addiction. What is clear though are the risk factors because of video game addiction of the kids.

The study involved 3,034 kids from Singapore in different age groups who were subjected to surveys from 2007 through 2009.

The experts pointed out though that there are kids who play video games without having any effect to their social lives or life in general. Parents can consider it an addiction when the other aspects of the kid’s life is affected. Some symptoms may involve long hours inside his or her room playing video games, different set of friends, or decreased performance in school. Some factors that contribute to video addiction include playing video games 30 hours every week, decreased empathy, increased impulsiveness, and lower social competence.

The Internet has been an escape to most of the people who’d like to hide their real persona. There are those who come out of their closet online without having people know what they are in real life. There are those who pretend to be someone else. It’s easy to be anonymous online. But a recent study has it that there’s such a thing called online victimization.

Brendesha Tynes, a teacher for educational psychology, worked along with Michael T. Giang, David R. Williams, and Geneene N. Thompson to see if racial discrimination has anything to do with negative psychological adjustment. From this goal came the categorization of online and offline discrimination.

The team found out that, indeed, online discrimination is part of reality. And the more challenging part of the study they faced was in proving that such a phenomenon causes depression and teen anxiety.

In the study they have made, there were evidences that suggest the presence of anxiety. 71 percent of the African-American teenagers turned out to have been affected with online racial discrimination at least once in their lives. This is just part of the extensive study they did. In the end, they found out that depression or anxiety could creep in to someone who experiences online racial discrimination even just once in their lives.

The results of the study have been officially released in a rationale-type article entitled “Online Racial Discrimination and Psychological Adjustment among Adolescents.”

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