Abstract: PIU (Pathological Internet Use) is a term used to denote problematic Internet use. Young’s eight criteria deduced from the problematic gambling standard of DSM is often used to diagnose PIU. It can be diagnosed as long as one fulfills more than five criteria. The incidence of PIU is about 6%~14% and it can result in mental and physical problems. Pressure, personality, and cognitive characteristics are contributors to PIU, of which implicit cognitive characteristics and implicit cognitive strategies are the key factors. There are two paradigms of implicit cognition characteristics in the current research; one is an implicit association paradigm and the other is a STROOP paradigm. Both of these take RT (reaction time) as the main index.
A total of 671 college students were chosen from Grades 1 to 4 as subjects, of which 56 were PIU students. According to the diagnosis scores, the non-PIU subjects were divided into three groups: high addictive tendency group (172), low score group (167), and people between them (286). We adopted a 4 × 2 mixed design and used a computer for this experiment. Four groups of subjects finished the traditional STROOP experiment and the emotional STROOP experiment, both of which require subjects to denominate the colors of emotional words (i.e., positive or negative), neutral words, and Internet-related words, then record their RT.
The results indicate that: (1) there was a significant difference between the RT of PIU subjects and high addictive tendency subjects on Internet-related words and that of neutral ones (T values were 12.62 and 11.38, p﹤0.01); (2) the average RT of female subjects on Internet-related words and neutral words were 411.97 and 394.36. Males’ RTs were 427.68 and 401.41—however, there was no significant difference between male subjects and female ones; (3) there was a significant difference in RT for emotional words, among the four groups. There was no significant difference for neutral words.
The RT of college students with PIU and those with high addictive tendency on Internet-related words was larger than those of the other two groups, and showed cognitive interference; the RT for emotional words was also larger than for the other two groups, and showed emotional interference

Key words: cognitive interference, emotional interference, PIU college students