User:TomLee91/sandbox

Griffiths criteria

Mark D. Griffiths' six criteria of internet addiction are:

1. Salience: When the use of the Internet becomes the more important activity in an individual’s life and dominates their thinking (pre-occupations and cognitive distortions), feelings (cravings) and behavior (deterioration of socialized behavior). For example, even when the individual is offline, they are thinking about the next time they will be online.
2. Mood modification: This refers to the subjective experiences that people report as a consequence of engaging in Internet use and can be seen as a coping strategy (i.e. they experience an arousing “buzz” of a “high” or paradoxically tranquilizing feel of “escape” or “numbing”).
3. Tolerance: This is the process by which users increase the level of Internet use they partake in to achieve mood modification effects. So, for someone who is engaged in Internet use, they tend to gradually increase the amount of time online, to increase further the mood modification effects.
4. Withdrawal symptoms: The unpleasant feeling states and/or physical effects, which occur when Internet use is discontinued or suddenly reduced. Examples of withdrawal symptoms could include the shakes, moodiness and irritability etc.
5. Conflict: This refers to the conflicts between the Internet user and those around them (interpersonal conflict), conflicts with other activities (job, social life, hobbies and interests) or from within the individual themselves (intrapsychic conflict and/or subjective feelings of loss of control) which are concerned with spending too much time engaged in Internet use.
6. Relapse: The tendency for repeated reversals to prior patterns of Internet use to recur and for even the most extreme patterns typical of excessive Internet use or addiction can be rapidly restored, even after periods of abstinence or control.