Brief Mindfulness Training Mitigates College Students’ Mobile Phone Addiction: The Mediating Effect of the Sense of Meaning in Life

Abstract

Objective To explore the impact of brief mindfulness training on college students’ mobile phone addiction and the mediating effect of the sense of meaning in life between them. Methods This study has employed the mixed experimental design of 2 (experimental conditions) × 2 (time points), randomly assigned 44 college students into a mindfulness training group and a control group (22 college students in each group), and selected the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory (FMI), Mobile Phone Addiction Tendency Scale (MPATS), and Chinese Meaning in Life Questionnaire (C-MLQ) to conduct separate tests before and after mindfulness training. Results The results show that: (1) in the pretest, the differences between the mindfulness training group and the control group in the level of mindfulness, the level of mobile phone addiction, and the sense of meaning in life are not statistically significant; (2) in the posttest, compared with those of the control group, both the FMI score ( p =0.013) and the C-MLQ score ( p <0.001) of the mindfulness training group improve significantly, while the MPATS score ( p =0.008) of the mindfulness training group declines significantly; and (3) the Bootstrap analysis of the mediating effect shows that after the change in C-MLQ (95% CI [0.537, 11.630]) enters the equation, the direct effect of mindfulness training is not significant (95% CI [−3.254, 5.861]). Conclusion The results of this study reveal the impact and mechanism of brief mindfulness training on college students’ mobile phone addiction, and provide an empirical basis for intervening on mobile phone addiction.