Slips of the Mind, Social Fear and the Road Into Gaming Addiction

Why do some young people slide into problematic gaming while others, exposed to the same games and the same pressures, keep their play under control? A large new study from China offers one of the clearest answers yet, tracing a psychological chain that begins with small, everyday lapses of attention and memory and ends, for some, at the threshold of internet gaming disorder. The research, published in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, followed 5,094 adolescents and young adults aged 12 to 25 and mapped how cognitive failure, social anxiety and resilience interact to shape gaming risk.

Cognitive failure is a deceptively mundane concept. It refers to the blunders of everyday mental life: forgetting why you walked into a room, losing your train of thought mid-conversation, dropping a name you know perfectly well, or fumbling a task you have done a hundred times. Psychologists measure it with the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire, a classic instrument developed by Donald Broadbent and colleagues in the early 1980s that probes lapses in perception, memory and motor control. These lapses are not trivial noise. Decades of research link them to attentional control problems, stress vulnerability and, in the digital era, to heavier and less controlled use of screens.

The new study, led by Xupeng Zhang and Yuyang Xiao of Xiangya Hospital at Central South University, with senior authors Xiaoping Yi and Bihong T. Chen, asked a precise question: does cognitive failure drive gaming disorder directly, or does it work through something else? The something else the team identified is interaction anxiousness, the trait-level discomfort people feel in social encounters, measured here with the Interaction Anxiousness Scale originally developed by Mark Leary. The logic is intuitive. A young person whose attention wanders and whose memory stumbles may find face-to-face interaction more taxing and more embarrassing, and the structured, predictable social world of online games may then become a refuge.

The statistical architecture of the study reflects that logic. The researchers used a mediation model, a regression-based technique for testing whether the effect of one variable on another travels through an intermediate variable. Participants completed four validated instruments: the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire, the Interaction Anxiousness Scale, the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale and the Internet Gaming Disorder Scale Short-Form, a nine-item measure aligned with the DSM-5 criteria for gaming disorder. The results were striking. Cognitive failure was significantly associated with IGD symptom severity both directly and indirectly, and the indirect route through interaction anxiousness accounted for 33.51 percent of the total effect. In other words, roughly a third of the relationship between mental lapses and problematic gaming ran through social fear.

That mediation finding reframes how scientists might think about the pathway into gaming addiction. It suggests a cognitive-affective sequence in which attentional and memory failures erode confidence in real-world social settings, and social anxiety then pushes the individual toward environments where interaction is scripted, controllable and low-stakes. Online games offer exactly that: clear rules, avatars that can be logged off, and social feedback that is delayed and mediated rather than immediate and face-to-face. Prior work has already connected social anxiety to internet gaming disorder, but this study pins down the mechanism with unusual statistical clarity in a very large sample.

Yet the study’s most consequential finding concerns what breaks the chain. Psychological resilience, measured with the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, significantly moderated the association between cognitive failure and gaming disorder, with a moderation coefficient of minus 0.106 that was statistically significant at p equals 0.002. In plain terms, resilience acts as a buffer: among young people with the same level of cognitive failure, those with higher resilience showed a markedly weaker link to problematic gaming. The researchers then decomposed resilience into its sub-dimensions and found that tenacity, with a coefficient of minus 0.118, and strength, with a coefficient of minus 0.091, carried significant protective effects, while optimism alone did not moderate the overall relationship.

But optimism turned out to be the study’s wildcard. Although it failed to buffer the overall link between cognitive failure and gaming disorder, it played a surprising dual role inside the mediation pathway itself. On the first leg, from cognitive failure to interaction anxiousness, optimism was protective, with a coefficient of minus 0.071 that was highly significant. On the second leg, from interaction anxiousness to gaming disorder, optimism was risk-enhancing, with a coefficient of plus 0.087, also highly significant. The authors are careful about interpretation: because the data are cross-sectional, this should be read as a path-specific moderation effect rather than evidence about temporal stages. Still, the pattern is provocative. Optimistic young people may be less likely to become socially anxious in the first place, yet among those who are socially anxious, optimism may paradoxically accompany greater gaming engagement, perhaps by sustaining the belief that gaming is a harmless or even beneficial coping strategy.

The team is equally explicit about the limits of the design. Cross-sectional data capture associations at a single point in time, so the findings describe statistical relationships, not causal effects. It remains possible that heavy gaming itself worsens attention and memory, or that a third factor, such as sleep disruption or underlying impulsivity, drives both cognitive failure and gaming. The data are held under restrictions imposed by the ethics committee of Xiangya Hospital to protect participant privacy, and the study was approved under approval number 202211690 and conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, with informed consent from adult participants and parental consent plus participant assent for minors. The work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and Hunan provincial research programs.

Even with those caveats, the practical implications are substantial. Prevalence studies cited by the authors suggest that internet gaming disorder affects a meaningful share of adolescents worldwide, and meta-analytic work points to cognitive and emotional risk factors that cluster together. If roughly a third of the path from cognitive failure to gaming disorder runs through social anxiety, then interventions that target interaction anxiousness, for example through social skills training or cognitive behavioral approaches, could blunt a key transmission route. Meanwhile, the buffering roles of tenacity and strength suggest that resilience-building programs, which have shown promise in randomized trials of prevention for gaming and internet use disorders, may be most effective when they cultivate persistence and coping capacity rather than positive mood alone.

The study also adds a note of caution for anyone tempted to treat optimism as an unqualified good. In the psychology of addiction, protective and risk factors rarely behave uniformly across every link in a causal chain, and this research provides a concrete example of a trait that helps at one step and hurts at another. For clinicians, educators and parents, the takeaway is nuanced: the goal is not simply to make young people feel good, but to strengthen the specific capacities, sustained tenacity, adaptive coping and comfort in real social interaction, that keep everyday mental lapses from hardening into a pattern of compulsive play. For the thousands of young people represented in this dataset, and the millions they stand for, that distinction may shape how the next generation of prevention programs is built.

Subject of Research: The cognitive and emotional pathways linking cognitive failure to internet gaming disorder in adolescents and young adults

Article Title: Interplay of Cognitive Failure, Interaction Anxiousness, and Psychological Resilience in Adolescents and Young Adults with Internet Gaming Disorder

Article References: Zhang, X., Xiao, Y., Xu, J., Wang, Y., Wu, H., Deng, J., Yu, X., Grecucci, A., Yuan, K., Yi, D., Dong, H., Yi, X., & Chen, B. T. (2026). Interplay of Cognitive Failure, Interaction Anxiousness, and Psychological Resilience in Adolescents and Young Adults with Internet Gaming Disorder. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-026-01723-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11469-026-01723-2

Keywords: internet gaming disorder, cognitive failure, interaction anxiousness, psychological resilience, adolescents, young adults, social anxiety, mediation analysis, moderation, tenacity, optimism, China