Adolescent anxiety and gaming: a case study of stability loops

This research presents two longitudinal case studies of intensively gaming adolescents who express clinically significant anxiety symptoms in the Finnish cultural context. By means of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, two shared themes were constructed based on in-depth qualitative data from both participants: self-reinforcing loop between interpersonal problems and gaming, and self-reinforcing loop between lacking affordances and gaming. Collectively, the themes point at a developmental mechanism that we call stability loops: anxiety-gaming interactions that minimise changes over time in socioecological systems. These exploratory findings highlight how individual experiences of circumstances create potentially different loop trajectories, which can both complicate and support age-relevant development depending on the social context. As such, the study offers an alternative to diagnostic gaming frameworks by modelling the activity as a part of psychological development in a world where technology is rapidly evolving and ubiquitous.