E-Sports, Anxiety, Aggression and Psychological Well-being: A Cross-sectional Study

Introduction: Electronic sports or e-sports is also known as online gaming, professional gaming, computer gaming. Nowadays E-sports has gained a lot of popularity in the area of research. The people actively participate in it and most people even consider it as their career option. Although these sports has both positive and negative effects on the life of an individual. Aim: To investigate the relationship between E-sports, anxiety, aggression, and psychological well-being among adolescents and young males and females. Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted in Delhi and National Capital Region (Noida, Gurugram, Faridabad), from November 2020 to April 2021, included 102 participants within the age range of 16-27 years. The quantitative research method was adopted using descriptive survey method. The following questionnaire were used i.e. Problematic Online Gaming Questionnaire ShortForm (POGQ-SF) Hamilton Anxiety Scale (HAM-A); Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire (BPAQ) and Psychological Wellbeing scale-Short Form (PWB-SF). All these questionnaires were free to use. Pearson’s correlation method was used to assess the correlation between E-sports, anxiety, aggression, and psychological well-being and the p-value of 0.01 was considered as statistically significant. Results: There was no significant relationship found between eSports and anxiety among participants (r-value=0.112, p-value>0.01). There was a significant positive correlation between eSports and aggression (r-value=0.377; p-value<0.01). Which indicated that participants with high level of problematic gaming had high level of aggression. Also, a significant negative correlation was found between eSports and psychological wellbeing (r-value=-0.259; p-value<0.01). Conclusion: From the present study, it can be concluded that participants who scored higher in problematic E-sports had higher level of aggression and poorer psychological well-being.