Background: The increase in the use and excessive consumption of the Internet has raised concerns about the incidence of addiction and its psycho-cognitive consequences. It seems necessary to investigate the effective factors in this field.
Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate the mediating role of depression, cognitive flexibility, and self-compassion in the relationship between perfectionism and Internet addiction in students.
Methodology: This study was a descriptive-correlational study. The statistical population included students of Persian Gulf University, Bushehr in the academic year 1402-1403, and multi-stage cluster sampling was performed. A total of 385 questionnaires were included in the analysis. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data, and then structural equation modeling with a variance-based approach was used to test the hypotheses; the analyses were performed in SPSS and SmartPLS software. The research instruments included Young's Internet Addiction Test (IAT), Hewitt and Felt's Multidimensional Perfectionism Questionnaire (1991), Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-13), Dennis et al.'s Cognitive Flexibility Questionnaire (CFI) (2010), and Reese et al.'s Short Self-Compassion Questionnaire (2011).
Findings: Path analysis showed that the direct path from perfectionism to Internet addiction was not significant alone (t = 1.514, β = 0.087). Perfectionism was significantly associated with increased depression. However, perfectionism was associated with increased depression and decreased self-compassion and cognitive flexibility. Depression showed a significant direct and positive effect on Internet addiction. Mediation analysis using bootstrap showed that depression, self-compassion, and cognitive flexibility have a partial mediating role in transmitting the effect of perfectionism on Internet addiction; the coefficient of determination of the Internet addiction variable was reported to be R² = 0.55.
Conclusion: The direct path of