Net-addicted teenagers have lower IQs: study

By Kwon E-youn

Internet overuse negatively influences teenager’s brain power, according to a recent local research Wednesday.

The outcome has come in the Internet addiction screening of 642 students - 389 students at a high school and 253 students at a girls middle school in Seoul.

The research shows that as many as 61 students or 9.5 percent of the total students screened to be addicted to surfing the net.

It was conducted by a medical team of Professors Kim Dai-jin and Park Min-hyeon at the psychiatry department of Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital affiliated with the Catholic University of Korea in southern Seoul.

The addicts started using the Internet habitually when they were 9.72 years old on average.

What’s worse is that 59 net-addicted students showed relatively lower intellectual capability compared to 43 other ordinary ones in an intelligence test.

The former group scored 9.92 on average in the understanding section, far lower than the 11.65 by the latter.

The researchers said that understanding tests how well a student can adapt him or herself to daily life, keep healthy relations with others and adjust to social customs, which are closely related with ethics, moral judgment and verification of reality.

Such a tendency was stronger among middle-school girls who were Internet addicted. They scored 10.5 in understanding, compared to 13 by general girls of same age group. And also in the vocabulary section, they were poorer with a score of 13 against 14.5 by ordinary middle school girls.

The researchers said it was highly probable that they used less time for learning given their poor scores in vocabulary, which is closely related to learning.

The net addiction also affected their numeracy skills.

Not surprisingly, a student who spends too much time surfing the Internet is also likely to have poor numeracy skills. The longer the child was addicted, the poorer he or she was at solving mathematical problems. When addicted to the net at a very young age, he or she also poorly memorized numbers.

Numeracy has something to do with sustained attention and working memory, while the ability to memorize numbers is related to auditory attention and short-term memory. It suggests that Internet-addiction in early age could cause deficiency of attention.

“At the age of 4-10, the environment and learning are critical to the development of cognitive function. If a child is addicted to Internet use at this time, without proper learning, it is highly probable that the child would have poor cognitive function,” said Prof. Kim Dai-jin. “So if your child shows any symptoms of addiction, take him to experts before it’s too late.”

The research paper is carried in the latest issue of the medical journal Psychiatry Research, published in the U.S.

The writer is a Korea Times intern.