Internet Gaming and Mental Health Among Late Adolescence University Students: Study Discipline as a Moderator

Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) has emerged as an increasingly prevalent behavioral health concern among late adolescent university students, a vulnerable population with emotional distress due to the developmental changes and academic pressures. This research explored the direct correlations between IGD and Mental Health Disorder (MHD), such as depression, anxiety, and stress in Saudi Arabia (SA) with study discipline as a moderator. A total of 480 students participated in the developed self-structured questionnaire, and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was employed to analyze the obtained data. The results showed that IGD can exert a positive and significant association with all three aspects of MHD. Moreover, the PLS-SEM slope analysis indicated that study discipline can significantly moderate the link from IGD to both anxiety and depression, with university students in health, science, and engineering fields displaying higher symptoms of depression and anxiety as compared to their peers in humanities and social sciences. However, study discipline failed to moderate the link from IGD to stress. These findings can be interpreted through maladaptive coping mechanisms and behavioral addiction, whereby extreme IG can contribute to social withdrawal, reduce sleep quality, and worsen stress regulation, specifically during the late adolescence period. The results extend current research on IGD by emphasizing the disciplinary differences in mental health vulnerability and offering more empirical evidence from a Middle Eastern context. The study highlighted the urgent need for discipline-oriented mental health screening and targeted proactive interventions to deal with unsettled IG attitude within a higher education context.