Digital Addiction in Older Adults: When Engagement Becomes a Mental Health Risk

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The editorial’s framing arrives at a moment when the demographic logic of digital addiction research is being quietly overturned. For most of the field’s short history, the prototypical subject has been young: the adolescent gamer, the university student doom-scrolling, the young professional whose smartphone use blurs the boundary between work and rest. This focus was never entirely arbitrary. Younger cohorts adopted internet technologies first, and early prevalence studies naturally sampled the populations most exposed. But as successive birth cohorts age with these technologies already woven into their daily routines, the assumption that problematic digital use is a phenomenon of youth becomes increasingly untenable. Today’s older adults video-call their grandchildren, manage prescriptions through patient portals, navigate with satellite guidance, and encounter algorithmically curated content on the same platforms as everyone else. The Research Topic assembled by Molinaro, Feher, and Truzoli captures the field at the point where it must decide whether its existing constructs, instruments, and thresholds of concern transfer meaningfully to a population whose life circumstances differ in fundamental ways.

One of the more consequential conceptual contributions of the collection is the insistence that digital engagement and problematic digital use are not points on a single continuum of screen time but qualitatively different states that must be distinguished analytically. This distinction has practical implications for how studies are designed and interpreted. A survey that measures only hours of daily use cannot distinguish between an older adult who spends substantial time online maintaining social ties, attending telehealth appointments, and pursuing hobbies, and one whose use has displaced sleep, eroded offline relationships, and become difficult to control. The finding by Hu and colleagues that internet use among rural older adults was associated with better mental health, operating partly through increased social participation, illustrates why this matters. For geographically isolated populations, digital connectivity may be among the few available channels for sustained social contact, and the counterfactual against which internet use should be evaluated is not abstinence but loneliness. Framing the question as technology versus no technology misses the relevant comparison entirely.

The psychosocial embedding of problematic use, emphasized across several contributions, also aligns with broader theoretical developments in behavioral addiction research. Contemporary models increasingly treat addictive behaviors as arising from the interaction between individual vulnerability, environmental affordances, and circumstantial stressors rather than from exposure alone. The study by Chen X.-M. and colleagues on older teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic is instructive here: the association between problematic internet use and psychological distress was entangled with fear, frustrated psychological needs, and occupational burnout. This suggests that during periods of heightened stress, digital behaviors may function as coping strategies that provide short-term relief while contributing to longer-term dysregulation. Such a reading complicates simple causal narratives in which screen time produces distress; it is equally plausible that distress drives escape-oriented use, which then deepens the original difficulties. Disentangling these directions requires longitudinal designs, which remain scarce in this population.

The contribution by Gui and colleagues deserves particular attention for its methodological approach. By applying interpretable machine learning to identify which variables most strongly predict the co-occurrence of internet addiction and maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation among community-dwelling older adults, the study moves beyond the bivariate associations that dominate much of the literature. The emergence of general wellbeing as the strongest predictor, alongside educational attainment and utilization of support services, reinforces the picture of problematic digital use as one manifestation of a broader vulnerability configuration rather than a free-standing pathology. This has implications for screening: a clinician encountering an older patient with signs of problematic internet use may be looking at a signal of depression, social deprivation, or unmet support needs rather than a technology-specific disorder, and treatment planning should reflect that possibility.

The emphasis on exercise in the longitudinal work by Chen B. and colleagues connects the Research Topic to a substantial body of evidence on behavioral substitution. Physical activity is among the most consistently supported protective factors in aging research, associated with preserved cognition, reduced depression risk, and improved sleep. The finding that positive exercise experiences predicted lower subsequent mobile phone addiction tendencies suggests a plausible mechanism: activities that provide reward, structure, and social contact may compete successfully with digital engagement for time and attention. From a prevention standpoint, this reframing is liberating. Rather than prescribing abstinence from screens, which is neither realistic nor desirable in an increasingly digital society, interventions can aim to enrich the offline reward landscape so that digital use occupies a smaller and less compulsive share of daily life.

The shift from studying vulnerable users to studying addictive environments, highlighted by the findings of Li and colleagues on personalized recommendations, interactive incentives, economic rewards, and goal-feedback mechanisms, situates this collection within a larger debate about the ethics of persuasive design. Attention-economy business models are built on maximizing engagement, and the psychological mechanisms they exploit, such as variable reward schedules, social comparison, and endless scroll architectures, do not discriminate by age. If anything, older adults may be differentially susceptible to certain design features: unfamiliarity with how recommendation algorithms operate, reduced capacity to detect manipulative interface patterns, and in some cases age-related changes in impulsivity or decision-making could all modulate vulnerability. The observation that differences in digital literacy affect the ability to recognize and regulate these mechanisms suggests that educational interventions targeting algorithmic awareness could form part of a prevention strategy, though this hypothesis awaits direct testing.

The discussion of generative AI by Vasiliu opens a frontier that the digital addiction literature is only beginning to map. Conversational agents differ from earlier digital technologies in ways that may be psychologically significant: they simulate empathy, remember personal details, respond fluently to emotional disclosure, and are available at any hour. Parasocial attachment to such systems could plausibly serve adaptive functions for isolated older adults, offering cognitive stimulation and a sense of being heard, while simultaneously displacing human contact or fostering dependence on interactions that lack genuine reciprocity. The review’s caution against prematurely codifying intensive AI engagement as a diagnostic category is well taken. The history of behavioral addiction research includes repeated episodes in which enthusiasm for new diagnostic labels outpaced the evidence base, and the field’s credibility depends on resisting that pattern. Loss of control, functional impairment, and distress remain the appropriate anchors for clinical concern, whatever the medium.

The scoping review by Jiang and colleagues exposes perhaps the most striking evidentiary gap in the collection. That 18 of 22 studies of smartphone-related addictive behaviors in adults over 60 were cross-sectional means the field cannot currently answer its most basic causal questions. Cross-sectional designs cannot determine whether problematic use precedes depression or follows it, whether sleep disturbance drives nocturnal phone use or results from it, or whether cognitive changes alter susceptibility to compulsive engagement. The relative strength of evidence for associations with sleep, mood, and loneliness, contrasted with the insufficiency of evidence on cognition, likely reflects measurement history as much as underlying biology: instruments for depression and sleep are well validated across age groups, whereas cognitive outcomes require longer observation windows and more sensitive tools. Prospective cohort studies with repeated cognitive assessment, ideally spanning years, would be needed to determine whether problematic digital behaviors influence cognitive trajectories in aging, and whether any such influence is harmful, protective, or bidirectional.

It is also worth noting what the collection implies about measurement. Most diagnostic criteria and screening instruments for internet and smartphone addiction were developed and validated in younger populations, often students, and their items may presuppose occupational or academic impairment domains that translate poorly to retirement. Questions about neglecting work deadlines or staying up gaming before school have limited purchase for a 72-year-old widow whose problematic use manifests as nocturnal scrolling that worsens insomnia or as withdrawal from community activities. Developing age-sensitive measures, a priority the editors explicitly identify, is therefore not a technical nicety but a prerequisite for accurate prevalence estimates and meaningful cross-cultural comparison. Without such instruments, apparent age differences in prevalence may reflect measurement artifacts rather than genuine epidemiological patterns.

The vision of healthy digital aging that emerges from this Research Topic is ultimately one of calibrated balance rather than prohibition. Digital participation can sustain autonomy, extend social networks into geographies and schedules that would otherwise be inaccessible, and support independent living as physical capacities change. The same environments can, under certain individual and design conditions, become vehicles for compulsive engagement that coexists with depression, poor sleep, and diminished wellbeing. The task for research and policy is to identify the boundary conditions: which patterns of use, in which people, at which points in the aging process, and within which design environments, shift engagement from adaptive to harmful. Answering that question demands longitudinal and cross-cultural evidence, integration of mental, physical, social, and cognitive health domains, and a conceptual framework that treats the older adult, their circumstances, and the digital environment as a single interacting system rather than assigning responsibility to any one element in isolation.

Subject of Research: …

Article Title: Editorial: Impact of digital addiction on mental health and comorbidities in older adults

Article References: Editorial: Impact of digital addiction on mental health and comorbidities in older adults. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2026.1988680

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fnbeh.2026.1988680

Keywords: digital addiction, older adults, healthy aging, mental health, problematic internet use, smartphone use, generative AI, cognitive aging, loneliness, depression, sleep quality, digital inclusion