The Relationship between Familial Emotional Atmosphere and Mental Health with Online Game Addiction

Online games are one of a kind of Internet games that, due to increasing awareness of the people and especially young people with the Internet, increasing the speed of the Internet and the availability of mobile Internet through smartphones, especially among boys, it has become so sweeping. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between family emotional atmosphere and mental health with addiction to online game. This study is descriptive correlational. The population consisted of all bachelor student of Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz in 2013-2014 academic year. The research sample consisted of 192 student of who were selected using multi stage cluster sampling. To collect data, online game addiction (OGA) scale & the family's emotional atmosphere (FEA) scale and mental health (GHQ) scale were used. Ethical Considerations: This study with research ethics code 94228369 was approved in Research Ethics Committee of Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, Iran. The results show that there is a positive and significant correlation between the emotional atmosphere of the family and online addiction (p <0. 01), and the overall score of mental health and addiction to online games (p <0. 01). Also, the results of regression analysis indicated that the family's emotional atmosphere could predict 0.30 variance of online addiction. The results of this study, while confirming the relationship between addiction to online games with mental health, emphasize the importance of the family environment in increasing the extent of addiction to the game.