Excessive reassurance seeking mediates relations between rumination and problematic smartphone use

Abstract

Aside from depression and anxiety, less is known about the relationship of problematic smartphone use (PSU) to other psychopathology- related variables. The authors' aim was to test previously neglected variables in relation to PSU: rumination and excessive reassurance seeking behavior (ERSB). The authors recruited 295 college students for a web-based survey of smartphone use frequency, PSU, depression and anxiety, ruminative thinking, and ERSB. The authors tested linear regression and mediation models, assessing rumination and ERSB as mediating associations between depression/anxiety severity with PSU, adjusting for age, sex, and smartphone use frequency. Results demonstrate that ERSB was significantly related to PSU severity, and ERSB mediated the association between rumination and PSU. Furthermore, the combination of rumination and ERSB mediated relations between both depression and anxiety severity with PSU. Results provide evidence for ERSB as an important variable in understanding relationships between psychopathology symptoms and PSU severity among college students.

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

“…The third Factor (Online Vigilance) related to cognitive preoccupation and orientation toward social media content with items reflecting salience (i.e., thinking intensively online spaces), reactivity (i.e., readiness to react to smartphone cues even if it involves interruption of activities), and monitoring (i.e., tendency to actively observe online engagement parallel to other activities) (91). The findings supported a strong relationship between distraction and online preoccupation and vigilance, and may predispose an individual to distract frequently and check digital devices excessively for reassurance (92) and use smartphones more than intended or in a compulsive way (52,91,253). Online vigilance therefore, appears potentially fueled by FOMO and associated with disruptions to attend to smartphone content, further corroborating previous findings from the literature reporting regulation deficits in IGD and Problematic Internet Use (PIU) (118,186,254,255).…”

“…Therefore, the overlap and the high inter-correlation amongst the factors was expected. However, recent evidence on highly prevalent non-social smartphone and process use (e.g., watching videos, browsing online) (73) has been associated with problematic smartphone use (92,94) and should therefore be taken into account in future studies by including items related to the diverse content that a smartphone provides access to.…”

“…More specifically, the rationale for the development of this scale was based on the premise that distractive smartphone use appears to be driven primarily by the cognitive preoccupation with social media content in order to attend to needs for validation and control (of content, self-presentation, and relationships). This preoccupation and urge to check (90) or interact, in turn, prompts emotional reactivity and behavioral activation in the form of distraction (40,91), amplified by FOMO and the need to control self-presentation and others' perceptions or seek reassurance (92). This process could also be experienced from non-social use (73,93) because smartphones are multi-purpose devices and recent studies suggest that process use (e.g., watching videos, browsing online) is widespread as much as social use (73) and with stronger associations with problematic smartphone use (92,94).…”

“…This preoccupation and urge to check (90) or interact, in turn, prompts emotional reactivity and behavioral activation in the form of distraction (40,91), amplified by FOMO and the need to control self-presentation and others' perceptions or seek reassurance (92). This process could also be experienced from non-social use (73,93) because smartphones are multi-purpose devices and recent studies suggest that process use (e.g., watching videos, browsing online) is widespread as much as social use (73) and with stronger associations with problematic smartphone use (92,94). In the present study, it is contended (and supported by empirical studies) that social media content is largely responsible for the attentional drift associated with frequent and prolonged smartphone engagement among young adults (95,96).…”

Associations between symptoms of problematic smartphone, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram use: An item-level exploratory graph analysis perspective

“…This said, studies with mainly non-clinical samples have repeatedly demonstrated that PSU and problematic social networks use are associated with symptoms of depression and anxiety (Elhai, Dvorak, Levine, & Hall, 2017;Elhai, Levine, & Hall, 2019;Primack et al, 2017), as well as other important factors, such as poorer academic achievement (Kates, Wu, & Coryn, 2018;Rozgonjuk, Saal, & T€ aht, 2018), decreased productivity (Duke & Montag, 2017), and riskier driving (Oviedo-Trespalacios, Haque, King, & Demmel, 2018a;Oviedo-Trespalacios, Haque, King, & Washington, 2018b). In addition, PSU has been associated with transdiagnostic constructs relevant to development and maintenance of anxiety and mood disorders, such as emotion dysregulation (Hoffner & Lee, 2015;Pancani, Preti, & Riva, 2019;, intolerance of uncertainty Rozgonjuk et al, 2019b, excessive reassurance seeking (Billieux, Maurage, Lopez-Fernandez, Kuss, & Griffiths, 2015aElhai et al, 2020), personality traits, such as neuroticism (Balta, Emirtekin, Kircaburun, & Griffiths, 2018;Cho, Kim, & Park, 2017;Lachmann, Duke, Sariyska, & Montag, 2019) and impulsivity (Billieux, Van der Linden, d'Acremont, Ceschi, & Zermatten, 2007;Kim et al, 2016;Peterka-Bonetta et al, 2019), and fear of missing out (Gezgin, 2018;Servidio, 2019;Wolniewicz, Rozgonjuk, & Elhai, 2019). Similarly to PSU, studies have found problematic social networks use to be associated both with psychopathology (Shensa et al, 2017), transdiagnostic factors, such as fear of missing out and neuroticism (Blackwell et al, 2017), and decreased work productivity (Zivnuska, Carlson, Carlson, Harris, & Harris, 2019;Rozgonjuk, Sindermann, Elhai & Montag 2020).…”