Smartphone Addiction and Its Relationship with Indices of Social-Emotional Distress and Personality
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Smartphone Addiction and Its Relationship with Indices of Social-Emotional Distress and Personality Adam M. Volungis 1
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& Maria Kalpidou & Colleen Popores & Mark Joyce
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# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract We examined the relationships among smartphone addiction, social-emotional distress (e.g., anxiety, depression, sleep quality, and loneliness), and personality traits among 150 undergraduate college students. Participants completed the Smartphone Addiction Scale, the Outcome Questionnaire-45.2, the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, the UCLA Loneliness Scale-3, and the Neuroticism-Extraversion-Openness Five-Factor Inventory-3. Results showed that the more students were addicted to their smartphone, the higher their reported social-emotional distress was. Additionally, logistic analyses supported the predictive nature of smartphone addiction on specific domains of social-emotional distress. Personality did not moderate the relationship between smartphone addiction and social-emotional distress. However, neuroticism had a positive relationship with smartphone addiction, while extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientious all had a negative relationship with smartphone addiction. Overall, these findings can inform assessment and interventions targeted at reducing smartphone use and improving mental health of college students. Research implications are also provided considering the infancy of studying the effects of smartphone use on psychological well-being. Keywords Smartphone addiction . Depression . Anxiety . Sleep . Loneliness . Personality The Pew Internet and American Life Project recently reported that the use of technology has become an integral part of daily life for many Americans, especially adolescent and young adult usage of smartphones (Smith 2015). Not only has technology become more readily available across populations but also is easier to use. Preliminarily data show an
Portions of this research were presented as a paper in the Annual Convention of the New England Psychological Association in Worcester, MA (2016) and in the Annual Convention of the Eastern Psychological Association in Boston, MA (2017).
* Adam M. Volungis [email protected]
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Department of Psychology, Assumption College, 500 Salisbury St., Worcester, MA 01609-1296, USA
International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction
increasing trend of college-aged students having an excessive reliance on smartphones. In fact, according to a Pew Center survey, 94% of young people between the ages of 18 and 29 own a smartphone (Pew Research Center 2018). Although it is inevitable that smartphones serve a practical purpose for many daily activities, there is some indication that the frequent use and dependency on smartphones show cognitive and behavioral patterns similar to addictive disorders (Griffiths 2005; Lee et al. 2014). How addiction is conceptualized has been a contested topic for some time (Griffiths 2005). The use of the word “addiction” has often been reserved
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