Abstract
Previous research has shown that problematic smartphone use (PSU) is related to several affect-related psychopathology variables. Emotion dysregulation has been regarded as a central psychological factor associated with that type of psychopathology. In this paper, the association between expressive emotional suppression, a form of emotion dysregulation, with PSU was investigated. Furthermore, we tested if types of smartphone use (process and social use) mediated that association. Three hundred American college students participated in a web-based survey that included the Smartphone Addiction Scale (for problematic smartphone use), Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (assessing suppression), and Process vs. Social Smartphone Usage scale. We found that expressive suppression was correlated with both process smartphone use and PSU severity. Mediation analysis showed that process smartphone use completely mediated relations between suppression and PSU severity. The findings suggest that dysfunctional emotion regulation could lead to more process smartphone use that, in turn, may manifest in PSU severity. Contributions and limitations of the study are discussed.
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Due to the relatively high correlation between PSU and process smartphone use, we ran an exploratory factor analysis (EFA; using WLSMV estimator and oblique rotation) including the items of SAS and process smartphone use subscale. The results showed that, in general, process use scale loaded to one factor and SAS items loaded to other factors yielded in EFA. All but two items had a standardized factor loading of .35 or higher in process use scale; however, only one of these low-loading items fit to another factor better (factor loading of .36). Furthermore, only two items of SAS loaded to the factor strongly associated with process use (factor loadings .39 and .36); however, these items had higher loadings on other factors (.67 and .62, respectively). Therefore, although PSU and process use are highly correlated, these could still be considered as two separate scales.
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Rozgonjuk, D., Elhai, J.D. Emotion regulation in relation to smartphone use: Process smartphone use mediates the association between expressive suppression and problematic smartphone use. Curr Psychol 40, 3246–3255 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00271-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00271-4