While there is a growing collection of research on internet addiction and psychological issues, the majority of it has been done on younger people outside of the United States. The Internet Addiction Test and important measures of mood, disposition, and cognitive function were administered to 898 US adults ranging in age from 18 to 76 years old using Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform. The amount of Internet Addiction was investigated as a predictor of outcome variables using a series of multiple regressions. To explore differences between groups, ANCOVAs with Fisher's LSD post-hoc analyses were used using the amount of internet addiction as the grouping variable. Internet addiction was found to be a significant predictor of sadness, impulsivity, self-control, cognitive need, theories of cognitive skills, creativity achievement, cognitive failures, smartphone usage behaviors, mental rotation test, and cognitive reflection test. Furthermore, even mild degrees of internet addiction were linked to worse than ideal results. Furthermore, there was a strong relationship between age and online addiction, with older persons being less likely than younger adults to have greater levels of internet addiction. The relationship between internet addiction status and major psychological characteristics did not appear to be influenced by age. Future research should collect online and in-person data from people of all ages and backgrounds to better understand the mechanics and consequences of internet addiction throughout their lives.
