Disrupted Daily Activities From Interruptive Smartphone Notifications: Relations With Depression and Anxiety Severity and the Mediating Role of Boredom Proneness

Abstract

Public discourse about overuse as an undesired side effect of digital communication is growing. This article conceptually develops and empirically analyzes users' perceived digital overuse (PDO) as a widespread social phenomenon sensitive to existing inequalities. In an age of digital communication abundance and closing Internet access divides, overuse has not been systematically investigated nor are its social disparities known. In a first step, PDO is demarcated from Internet addiction, theoretically defined, and operationalized. Then, the prevalence of perceived overuse is assessed in a representative population sample of Italian Internet users (N = 2008) and predictors of digital overuse are tested. Results show that digital communication use and the level of social pressure to function digitally increase PDO. Education lowers PDO while increasing digital communication use and social digital pressure. Overuse is emerging as a new dimension of digital inequality with implications for theory and future research in digital well-being.

Exploring the Dimensions of Smartphone Distraction: Development, Validation, Measurement Invariance, and Latent Mean Differences of the Smartphone Distraction Scale (SDS)

“…Disruption from smartphone use is even more prominent within classroom environments (31)(32)(33), hindering academic achievement due to interference with primary tasks (12,34) and in less engaging academic contexts, prompting lower motivational levels and comprehension (12,35,36), task performance (37), and chronic media multitasking (12). Smartphone interruptive notifications are frequent external triggers (38) which disrupt daily activities and have even been associated with mood disorders mediated by boredom proneness (39).…”

“…The executive system is implicated when conflict arises between the exogenous and endogenous cues, leading to attention discontinuity and therefore poor attention deployment, prompting inhibitory or executive control difficulties ( 55 ). Distraction appears therefore to be the result of disruptions or interruptions in one of the three attention networks mediated by smartphone use ( 29 , 39 , 54 ).…”

Interactions of impulsivity, general executive functions, and specific inhibitory control explain symptoms of social-networks-use disorder: An experimental study

“…In 2016, there were 2.16 billion smartphone users worldwide and experts expect the number to rise to over 3.01 billion users by the year 2021 1 . Such devices typically generate auditory cues (ringtones) to inform people about new messages; and these are generated many times per day, anytime and anywhere 2 . Such ringtones indicate incoming calls, messages, or other novel information provided by online applications; and are associated with an implicit or explicit demand of a specific action, i.e., interacting with the smartphone 3 .…”

Youth Access to ICT Resources and Subjective Well-being in the Middle East: A Spatial Bivariate Copula Regression Analysis

“…For example, the adverse effect of increased number of phones with internet access at home on youth subjective well-being, seems to corroborate with the plethora of writings on the impact of problematic phone use on youth well-being. Indeed, Elhai et al, (2019), Sha et al, (2019), and Sindermann et al, (2020) all report adverse psychological well-being effects on youth, while Domoff et al, (2019) and Rodgers et al, (2020) report such adverse effects on youth physical well-being; and Clayton et al, (2015) on their cognition, emotion, and physiology. On the other hand, the negative effects of increased grade level in school, and increased parental education on the weighted likelihood of youth access to ICT resources at home seemed a bit odd and counterintuitive.…”

“…Moreover, a review of the current scientific evidence on the availability, access, and usage consequences of ICT on various dimensions of youth life are split in their conclusions (Burr et al, 2019;Crompton et al, 2017;Dickson et al, 2019;Newland et al, 2018;Orben & Przybylski, 2019;Parry et al, 2020;Vannucci & Ohannessian, 2019;Xin et al, 2018). Two major trends seem to dominate however, those reporting adverse effects on youth psychological well-being (Dhir et al, 2019;Elhai et al, 2019;Marino et al, 2018;Sha et al, 2019;Sindermann et al, 2020), physical well-being (Domoff et al, 2019;Rodgers et al, 2020) and those reporting an overall positive effect of ICT use by the youth (Cangas, 2019;Goodall et al, 2013;James et al, 2017;Loebach et al, 2019;Loid et al, 2020).…”