2 That’s the question Lawrence Lam, an epidemiologist at the University of Notre Dame in Fremantle, Australia, and his colleague Zi-Wen Peng at Sunyat-Sen University in Guangzhou, china, wanted to answer. Using a database of more than 1000 high school students in Guangzhou, the pair assessed Internet use and mental-health status over a period of nine months. At the start of the study, about 6% of the student met the criteria for pathological Web surfing, based on their answers to a 20-question survey assessing addiction to the Internet. These students reported feeling moody, nervous or uncomfortable when they were not on the computer.