ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Digital Mental Health
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Characteristics and Multiple Factors of Children and Adolescents’ Mental Health in the Internet AgeView all 5 articles
Exploring the Dynamic Interactions Between Internet Addiction, Anxiety, and Loneliness in Adolescents: A Longitudinal Cross-Lagged Panel Model
Provisionally accepted
- Yunnan Normal University Faculty of Education, Kunming, China
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With the widespread adoption of the Internet, Internet Addiction (IA) among adolescents has increasingly become a major global public health concern, exhibiting complex comorbid patterns with psychological issues such as anxiety and loneliness. This study employed a longitudinal two-wave design, collecting data from 1,720 secondary school students in Yunnan Province at two time points: October 2024 (T1) and March 2025 (T2). The Internet Addiction Test (IAT), the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale (GAD-7), and the UCLA Loneliness Scale (ULS) were utilized as measurement instruments. A cross-lagged panel model (CLPM) was constructed to systematically investigate the dynamic causal relationships among IA, anxiety, and loneliness. Results indicated that IA exhibited significant temporal stability and positively predicted subsequent anxiety and loneliness; loneliness also significantly predicted later levels of anxiety. These findings extend the theoretical framework of the Model of Compensatory Internet Use and provide empirical evidence for understanding the dynamic mechanisms underlying adolescent mental health. The results have significant implications for clinical interventions and educational policies, emphasizing IA and loneliness as critical targets for mental health interventions among Chinese adolescents.
Keywords: adolescence, Internet addiction, Loneliness, Anxiety, cross-laggedpanel model
Received: 15 Sep 2025; Accepted: 24 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wang and Gong. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yuntai Wang
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