Content area
Full text
Received Dec 15, 2017; Accepted Feb 8, 2018
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. Introduction
During the last decade, there has been an enormous development and diffusion of new forms of Internet-information and communication technology, such as social media, personal computer, mobile or cellular phone, and other devices [1]. Adolescents and young adults represent the most users of these different tools [2, 3], and the main purpose of use is social interaction and interpersonal communication [4]. However, research has underlined that some adolescents tend to use Internet excessively or in a maladaptive way, especially to manage psychological suffering [5] and negative emotions associated with problematic relationships with parents and peers [6].
During adolescence numerous changes occur, abilities functional to self-regulation are still relatively immature [7]: recent studies on adolescents’ brain development highlighted that emotion-activating experiences (including the over- or misuse of Internet) could interfere with significant modifications of brain regions and systems, such as the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. These areas play a key role in the regulation of emotions and in the evaluation of the risk [8, 9] and could be responsible for adolescents’ general tendency to risk taking and impulsivity [10, 11]. Therefore, it may explain also adolescents’ vulnerability to excessive use of Internet, especially with the lack of self-regulatory strategies [12] and when parents are unable to offer an external regulation to their offspring. Moreover, from a developmental point of view, young people go through many developmental tasks and, despite the time spent on the Internet, this could have a different function for them [13]. Specifically, in the early adolescence (from 12 to 14 years; [14]), numerous physical and emotional changes triggered by puberty occur and there is a progressive increase of reflection on emotional experiences [15]; middle adolescence (from 15 to 17 years) is characterized by the onset of adolescent’s psychological separation from parents and of the concomitant research of new significant extrafamilial figures, first of all peers; finally, during the late adolescence (from 18 to 20 years), youth have to define their personal, social, and sexual identities [14, 16, 17]. Thus, Internet gives...