Impulsivity Only Predicts Gaming Disorder Risk When Play Time Soars

Video games are now a defining pastime of the twenty-first century. Roughly 3.3 billion people around the world play regularly, and in Brazil the habit touches just over 70 percent of the population. For most players, gaming delivers entertainment, social connection, and even measurable cognitive and well-being benefits. But for a minority, the activity slides into something darker: gaming disorder, a condition the World Health Organization formally recognized in 2019, characterized by impaired control over gaming, rising priority given to play, and continuation despite serious negative consequences in personal, family, social, educational, or occupational life. A new study published in Trends in Psychology offers a fresh and technically nuanced picture of who is actually at risk, and the answer hinges on a surprising detail about how scientists measure impulsivity itself.

Researchers Alexandre Rimar Cintra and Fábio Leyser Gonçalves, affiliated with São Paulo State University and the University of São Paulo, recruited 290 adult Brazilian gamers through social media, chat groups, and gaming forums in July 2021. The sample was predominantly male, with participants ranging from 18 to 50 years old, and displayed enormous variation in habits: weekly play time ranged from one hour to a staggering 90 hours, average session lengths ran from 12 minutes to 10 hours, and most participants reported playing daily. The team’s central question was deceptively simple. Impulsivity is well established as a correlate of substance addiction, but does impulsive behavior predict gaming disorder, and does the answer depend on what kind of reward a person is actually choosing between?

To answer it, the researchers turned to delay discounting, a cornerstone paradigm of behavioral economics. The concept, rooted in classic self-control experiments from the 1970s, describes how the subjective value of a reward shrinks as the wait for it grows longer. Steeper discounting, meaning a reward loses its perceived value faster with delay, is considered a behavioral marker of impulsivity. In a delay discounting task, participants repeatedly choose between an immediate smaller reward and a delayed larger one, with the immediate offer systematically adjusted until the two options become subjectively equivalent. These indifference points are then summarized by the area under the curve, or AUC, a value between 0 and 1 where lower numbers indicate greater impulsivity.

Here is where the study’s key innovation comes in. Nearly all previous research on gaming disorder and impulsivity used hypothetical money as the reward, a convention inherited from the wider discounting literature. But a growing body of evidence shows that non-monetary rewards are discounted more steeply than money, a phenomenon called the domain effect. Studies of substance dependence have long adapted their tasks to match the substance at hand; tobacco smokers, for example, discount cigarette outcomes far more steeply than monetary ones. Only one earlier gaming study, led by Buono and colleagues in 2017, had ever adapted the task to gaming itself. Cintra and Gonçalves ran both versions: a monetary task where the delayed reward was 100 Brazilian reais, and a gaming-session task where the delayed reward was 60 minutes of play. Delays ranged from one day to six months, with the immediate offer halving its adjustment with each successive choice.

The results on the domain effect were striking. Participants were significantly more impulsive in the gaming task than in the monetary task, with the monetary AUC averaging 0.657 versus 0.393 for gaming time, a large effect size of d = 0.828. The two measures were positively correlated, suggesting they tap the same underlying construct of impulsive choice, yet they diverged sharply in magnitude. The authors caution, however, that this difference could reflect either the domain effect or a magnitude effect, since it cannot be guaranteed that 100 reais and 60 minutes of play were subjectively equivalent. There is also a possible artifact: six months may be far too short a horizon for money, which people routinely think about over years or decades, making monetary choices look artificially self-controlled in this study’s compressed time frame.

The team also rigorously validated the Brazilian Portuguese adaptation of the Internet Gaming Disorder Scale Short Form, or IGDS9-SF, a nine-item instrument covering both DSM-5 and ICD-11 diagnostic criteria. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses converged on a single-factor structure with exceptional fit indices, including a comparative fit index of 0.998. The symptoms most tightly bound to the dependence construct were mood modification from abstinence, failure to cut down, continued gaming despite interpersonal harm, and tolerance. Notably, difficulty controlling the behavior and continuing despite adverse consequences, the core features of addiction itself, emerged as central regardless of whether the population was English-speaking, Portuguese, or Brazilian. Symptoms tied to interpersonal concealment and functional impairment carried less weight in Lusophone samples, hinting at cultural texture in how gaming disorder expresses itself. Applying a cutoff corresponding to answering at least sometimes to every question, 9 percent of the sample fell into the risk group.

The most consequential finding emerged from the logistic regression. Impulsivity measured in the monetary domain showed no significant relationship with gaming disorder risk, in contrast to several earlier studies. But impulsivity in the gaming domain did: each one-tenth increase in gaming AUC, indicating more self-controlled choices, raised the odds of being in the not-at-risk group by about 23 percent. Even more intriguing, weekly gaming time moderated this relationship. Among players logging fewer than 17 hours per week, impulsive choice made virtually no difference to risk. Among the heavy players, the picture changed dramatically, with steeper gaming discounting strongly associated with elevated risk. Estimated probability of belonging to the risk group reached 17.7 percent for high-time players, versus just 1.7 percent for lighter players.

Weekly gaming time itself proved a powerful predictor. Players in the heaviest bracket, 17 hours or more per week, were dramatically less likely to fall in the not-at-risk group compared with those playing under 5 hours, with odds ratios exceeding 17. This echoes the earlier work of Buono and colleagues, who found that gamers playing 17 or more hours weekly showed greater discounting overall. The authors emphasize, following Charlton and Danforth, that time alone cannot define the disorder, since highly engaged players may lack the functional impairments essential for diagnosis. Still, total weekly time clearly outperformed average session duration, and variables like gaming habits, gender, and age showed no significant effects in this sample, even though broader prevalence research points to higher rates among young males.

The study has honest limitations. The convenience sample was recruited online and underrepresented women and mobile gamers, self-report introduces bias, and only 26 participants met the risk criterion, forcing the researchers to use a risk cutoff rather than clinical diagnosis. A sensitivity analysis showed the study was adequately powered to detect odds ratios of roughly 1.60 or greater, meaning the gaming AUC effect, which fell just below that threshold, deserves replication in larger samples. Disentangling the domain effect from the magnitude effect will also require tasks engineered to equate subjective reward values across domains.

Nevertheless, the implications ripple outward. For researchers, the message is methodological: measuring impulsivity in gamers with money alone may miss the very decisions that matter, because the relevant domain is the game itself. For clinicians and the public, the takeaway is more calibrated. Impulsive choice is not a universal red flag for gaming problems; it becomes a meaningful warning sign specifically when combined with heavy weekly play. As gaming disorder continues to provoke debate among scientists, health bodies, and players alike, this study suggests the path forward lies not in condemning a beloved pastime, but in understanding precisely which psychological patterns, in which contexts, turn play into compulsion.

Subject of Research: The relationship between impulsive behavior, gaming habits, and gaming disorder risk in Brazilian gamers.

Article Title: The Relationship Between Impulsive Behavior, Gaming Habits, and Gaming Disorder

Article References: Cintra, A. R., & Gonçalves, F. L. (2026). The Relationship Between Impulsive Behavior, Gaming Habits, and Gaming Disorder. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00520-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00520-z

Keywords: gaming disorder, impulsivity, delay discounting, behavioral addiction, video games, psychology, IGDS9-SF, domain effect, Brazilian gamers, self-control, mental health, Relationship