According to a new American study, addiction to smartphones directly predicts later depressive symptoms, especially in adolescents, a very vulnerable population.
The depression is progressing more and more in France. Between 2010 and 2017, it would have increased by two points, particularly affecting women, those under 45 and the most precarious, according to a report published a year ago. At the same time, more and more studies are linking this disease to screens, especially among young people. According to a recent American study, adolescents have been more psychologically fragile since the 2010s, suffering from loss of appetite, disturbed sleep and lack of interest in many activities, and this would be linked to these new technologies which are increasingly more widespread.
But if this link has often been demonstrated, it was still unclear whether addiction to screens preceded the symptoms of depression and loneliness or if it was on the contrary a consequence. According to a study conducted by the University of Arizona (USA) to be published in the Journal of Adolescent Health targeted at smartphone addiction, it “directly predicts later depressive symptoms”.
“The research stems from my concern about the overemphasis on general smartphone use,” says Lapierre, an assistant professor in the Department of Communications at the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. He and his colleagues therefore decided to follow a particularly vulnerable population, in a transitional phase of life and having grown up partly with smartphones: adolescents. They therefore studied the behavior of 346 young people aged 18 to 20, focusing their work on their psychological dependence on their phones rather than on general phone use, which can provide benefits.
Reduce smartphone addiction to improve well-being
Participants were asked questions designed to identify loneliness, depressive symptoms and their daily use of smartphones, once at the start of the study and then four months later. To measure phone addiction, the researchers asked them to use a four-point scale to respond to a series of statements such as “I panic when I can’t use my smartphone”. The researchers found that smartphone addiction predicted higher reports of depressive symptoms and loneliness rather than the opposite.
Understanding the link between smartphone addiction and poor psychological outcomes is key to knowing how best to tackle the problem, say the researchers.
“If depression and loneliness lead to smartphone addiction, we could reduce addiction by adjusting people’s mental health (…) But if smartphone addiction precedes depression and loneliness, which is what we found, we can reduce smartphone addiction to maintain or improve well-being,” says Pengfei Zhao, master’s student in communication, co-author of the study.
“It might be easier for late teens to become addicted to smartphones, and smartphones may have a bigger negative influence on them because they’re already very vulnerable to depression or loneliness,” he continues.
Talk to a close friend or meditate
Given the potential negative effects of smartphone addiction, the researchers therefore invite users to neutrally assess their relationship to their cell phone and to impose limits on themselves if necessary. Meanwhile, with other studies suggesting some people use their phones to try to relieve stress, finding other ways to relax could be a solution, say the scientists. “When people feel stressed, they should use other healthy approaches to coping, such as talking to a close friend for support or doing exercises or meditation,” Zhao comments.
Based on these results, researchers would now like to try to understand the causes of this relationship between smartphone addiction and depression and loneliness. “Our job is to answer essential questions about the psychological effects of smartphone addiction. So one may begin to wonder why this is the case,” concludes Zhao.
Smartphones are regularly singled out by scientific studies. Apart from their harmful effect on the mental health of users, they are also said to be very bad for comprehension and physical fitness. It has thus been proven that excessive interaction of electronic devices could weaken the activity of certain areas of the brain, affecting the understanding of several sources of information such as scientific articles. In addition, according to a study published this summer, people using their smartphone for at least five hours a day run a 43% increased risk of obesity.
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