Is Mobile Addiction a Unique Addiction: Findings from an International Sample of University Students (original) (raw)

2019, International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction

This research explores whether addictions around mobile phones should be treated more as a physiological or a psychological problem. A new survey about mobile addiction and time use (MATU), constructed from several studies, tests to what degree time use on mobile phones (a physiological cause) is correlated with four behavioral factors predicting proneness to addiction, respectively one physiological problem and three psychological problems: sensation seeking, impulsiveness, anxiety, and hopelessness. Equally, an index on how strongly students interpret that they have a mobile addiction problem was tested for whether it was correlated to the same four factors. A sample of 1219 students was drawn from four universities, three in the USA and one in South Korea. Correlations between six indexes were analyzed. Students who think they have a "mobile phone time use problem" do not report high (physiological) sensation seeking at all (0.18, p < 0.01) yet have higher correlations only with three psychological problems: impulsiveness (0.64, p < 0.01), hopelessness (0.47, p < 0.01), and anxiety (0.31, p < 0.01). On the other hand, the exact inverse occurs among actual sensation seekers with high time use (0.85, p < 0.01) who lack high correlations with three psychological problems (each below 0.15, p < .01). The pattern held across four different universities and two countries with minimal variations. Mobile addictions appear to be two different types of individualized problems instead of one: physiological problems for some (without major psychological problems) and psychological problems for others (without high time use). This research may help influence policy to target different individual problems in mobile addiction.