Comparison of basic emotional facial expressionrecognition and emotional working memoryperformances of young adult male groups with andwithout problematic digital gaming behavior

The main purpose of this thesis is to compare young adult male individuals with and without problematic digital game playing behaviour in terms of recognition performance of 6 basic emotional (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust and surprise) and 1 neutral facial expression and to examine the effect of these basic emotional expressions on working memory performance. In the experimental section of the study, the study was applied to a total of 63 volunteer participants while providing data. However, the total sample size used for data analysis was 48 participants (24 people with Problematic Digital Gaming Behaviour (PDOOD+) and 24 people without Problematic Digital Gaming Behaviour (PDOOD-)). Beck Depression Inventory, State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, Game Addiction Scale for Adolescents and Toronto Alexithymia Scale were administered to all participants. The scores obtained from these scales determined the sample for data analysis. The coding, recognition and working memory tasks in the study were applied to all participants through a computer application. The findings of the study were analyzed as 2 (Group: Problematic Digital Gaming Behaviour and Non-Problematic Digital Gaming Behaviour) x 2 (Picture Gender: Female and Male) x 7 (Emotional Facial Expression: Sadness, Fear, Surprise, Anger, Disgust, Happy and Neutral) mixed design with repeated measures in the last two factors. The number of correct responses and correct response time measurements measured at each level of the independent variables were evaluated as dependent variable measurements, and the statistical analyses of the data were performed through 2x2x7, 2x7 and 2x2 repeated measures ANOVA. According to the results of this analysis, participants coded Male emotional facial expressions significantly more accurately than Female emotional facial expressions. In addition, according to both the number of correct responses and response times, participants in both groups (PDOOD- and PDOOD+) gave the lowest correct response count and the slowest reaction time for the Fear expression, while they gave the highest correct response count and the fastest reaction time for the Happiness facial expression in the coding task. In the recognition task of the study, the highest d'score was measured for Disgust facial expression and the lowest d' score was measured for Sadness facial expression. Furthermore, the recognition performance of the PDOOD- group was better than the PDOOD+ group in Fear and Sadness, however the recognition performance of the PDOOD+ group was better than the PDOOD- group in Surprise and Neutral in the recognition task. It was observed that the participants performed the 2-Back Letter task more easily than the 2-Back Emotion Task. When the d' averages were analyzed in the 2-Back Emotion Task, except for Happiness and Neutral facial expressions, working memory performance worsened when the target stimulus was negative. Moreover, the PDOOD+ group showed the lowest working memory performance when the target stimulus was Female Sad emotional facial expression. As a result, in this study it was tried to reveal the differences between the two groups in terms of coding, recognition and working memory performances.