Boredom proneness and rumination mediate relationships between depression and anxiety with problematic smartphone use se
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Boredom proneness and rumination mediate relationships between depression and anxiety with problematic smartphone use severity Yan Wang 1,2 & Haibo Yang 3 & Christian Montag 4,5 & Jon D. Elhai 2,6 Accepted: 4 September 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Problematic smartphone use (PSU) symptoms are related to mental health symptoms, such as depression and anxiety. However, less investigated are current psychopathology-related processes in mediating these relationships. We analyzed boredom proneness and rumination, two variables involving negative affectivity, as possible mediators between mental health and PSU severity. We recruited 1097 Chinese university students to complete online questionnaires measuring levels of PSU, smartphone use frequency (SUF), depressive and anxious symptoms, boredom proneness and rumination. Structural equation modeling demonstrated that boredom proneness and rumination were significantly related to both SUF and PSU severity. SUF inversely mediated relations between boredom proneness and PSU severity, but positively accounted for relations between rumination and PSU levels. This is one of few studies testing boredom proneness or rumination in relation to PSU severity. Boredom proneness and rumination may be important variables involving negative affectivity, explaining why some depressed or anxious individuals overuse their smartphones. Keywords Anxiety . Boredom proneness . Depression . Smartphone addiction . Rumination
Introduction Despite the efficiency advantages of using a smartphone, overuse is a serious problem for many people. Excessive smartphone use is especially related to mental health symptoms, including depressive and anxious symptoms (Elhai et al. 2019a; Thomée 2018). However, less is known about more contemporary constructs that are important in psychopathology research and may relate to excessive smartphone use.
Excessive smartphone use is often labeled as “problematic smartphone use” (PSU) in research. PSU involves disproportionate overuse of a smartphone with concomitant symptoms common in substance use disorders, including social or jobrelated impairment (Duke and Montag 2017; Montag and Walla 2016), and withdrawal from non-use (Billieux et al. 2015a). Other similar terms exist for PSU in the literature (Elhai et al. 2019a), but we refer to this construct as “PSU” in this paper. We emphasize that PSU is not a recognized
Reprints from this paper can be requested from Jon Elhai through his website: www.jon-elhai.com * Haibo Yang [email protected] Yan Wang [email protected] Christian Montag [email protected]
2
Department of Psychology, University of Toledo, 2801 West Bancroft Street, Toledo, OH 43606, USA
3
Academy of Psychology and Behavior, Tianjin Normal University, No. 57-1 Wujiayao Street, Hexi District, Tianjin 300074, China
4
Department of Molecular Psychology, Institute of Psychology and Education, Ulm University, 89081 Ulm, Germany
5
neuSCAN Laboratory, Clinical Hospital of the Che
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