This time, I'd like to talk about smartphone addiction and personality traits.
How many hours a day do you spend on your smartphone?
If you use it for work, your phone may be taking up most of your day.
Smartphone addiction may be a modern disease that cannot be ignored as it causes all kinds of mental disorders and interrelationships.
The study presented here investigates the prevalence of smartphone addiction and its relationship with personality traits and other factors.
The study
We are reviewing a cross-sectional study conducted among medical students in a public medical school.
The DASS-21, a neurotic personality subscale of the USMaP-i and SAS-SV, was administered to measure psychological distress, neurotic personality, and smartphone addiction among medical students.
Spearman correlation coefficients were run to determine the correlation between smartphone addiction with psychological distress and neurotic personality.
A simple linear regression was run to investigate the factors associated with smartphone addiction.
A total of 574 medical students participated in the study.
According to the study results, the prevalence of smartphone addiction was 40.6%.
The result is higher among males (49.2%) as compared to female (36.6%) medical students.
A considerable positive correlation was shown between smartphone addiction and psychological health.
Depression = 0.277, p-value < 0.001
Anxiety = 0.312, p-value < 0.001
Stress = 0.329, p-value < 0.001
However, the positive correlation between smartphone addiction and neurotic personality is insufficient.
A simple linear regression showed that a one unit increase in smartphone addiction was associated with a significant increase in levels of depression, anxiety, stress, and neurotic personality.These results demonstrate a significant relationship between smartphone addiction, psychological health and neurotic personality.
Discussion
The results of this study show that addiction is related to psychological health and neurotic tendencies of personality.
First of all, the relationship between depression and smartphone addiction is positively correlated as shown in the research results, so the risk of depression tends to increase as the addiction becomes more severe.
The most common problem was nighttime use, which disrupts sleep and harms psychological health.Secondly, anxiety and smartphone addiction are positively correlated, so the more severe the addiction, the higher the tendency for anxiety.
One of the most common behaviors is checking the screen of your phone repeatedly to wait for a message from someone, which is also a common anxiety behavior.
Since the study was conducted by medical students, the relationship between smartphone addiction and stress was also positively correlated, as stress in medical training decreases self-control and increases the likelihood of smartphone addiction.
This means that if you don't practice ways to cope with stress, your addiction will accelerate because the point of stress relief will be your phone.
Finally, there was a low correlation between people with neurotic tendencies and smartphone addiction, so it seems that people with neurotic tendencies do not necessarily become addicted to smartphones.
However, for the reasons mentioned above, there was a significant relationship between smartphone dependence, anxiety and depression, and an increase in the neurotic tendency score.
Since people with this personality trait get a sense of security from other people through their smartphones, it was suggested that it is not necessary to get rid of smartphones completely, but to review the way they are used and the relationships they have with other people through their smartphones.
Lei LY, Ismail MA, Mohammad JA, Yusoff MSB. The relationship of smartphone addiction with psychological distress and neuroticism among university BMC Psychol. 2020;8(1):97. published 2020 Sep 11. doi:10.1186/s40359-020-00466-6
Conclusion
The trigger for smartphone addiction is stress in daily life, which leads to dependence on the phone, which leads to depression, which amplifies the neurotic tendencies of the personality, which leads to a decline in the quality of daily life.
The results of the research suggest that this is a negative chain of events.
The strategy is to avoid amplifying depression and neurotic tendencies too much by dealing with stress in a different way and practicing proper smartphone usage.
Try to spend less time alone on the phone and more time talking with family and friends.