The Influence of Acute Aerobic Exercise on Craving Degree for University Students with Mobile Phone Dependency: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Abstract

These days, mobile phone dependency (MPD) has become one of the most imperative and impressive puzzles in the area of behavioral addictions and public health across the world, especially the individuals with MPD that might frequently crave using mobile phones themselves. The target of the current study was to determine whether moderate-intensity aerobic exercise could reduce the craving degree for mobile phones for university students with MPD by a randomized, controlled trial. Sixty Chinese undergraduates, including 30 male and 30 female students aged from 18 to 22 years (20.08 ± 1.94 years) with MPD were recruited and then randomly assigned to the exercise group (n = 30) or the control group (n = 30) with even numbers by gender and major. Participants in the exercise group were required to perform an acute moderate-intensity treadmill exercise lasting for 30 min at 45–68% heart rate reserve (HRR) with background music, while the control group were only asked to listen to the same music for 40 min without any exercise. Sport watches were employed to monitor their heart rate (HR), and the exercise group was also obliged to report their rating of perceived exertion (RPE). After completing the experimental task, a visual analog scale (VAS) was used to evaluate their craving degree for mobile phones, and an independent samples t-test was computed to reveal the difference in the scores of craving degree for mobile phones between the two groups. The results showed that the VAS score for the exercise group (3.77 ± 1.36) was significantly lower (p < 0.001) than that of the control group (6.11 ± 1.39). The findings suggested that acute moderate-intensity aerobic exercise could be an effective and reliable means to help deal with the issue of mobile phones craving for the undergraduates with MPD, and more longitudinal intervention studies and control trial designs should be conducted in the near future to further test the long-term effects of this exercise.

The mediating effect of subject well-being between physical activity and the internet addiction of college students in China during the COVID-19 pandemic: a cross-sectional study

“…The total scores for physical activity were from 0 to 100. This measure has been widely used in the Chinese university population and has shown good reliability and validity (37,38). The internal consistency of the PARS-3 in this study was generally satisfactory, with a Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.817.…”

The Longitudinal Mediating Effect of Smartphone Dependency on the Relationship between Exercise Time and Subjective Happiness in Adolescents

“…While numerous studies emphasize the detrimental effects of increasing smartphone dependency on adolescent mental health [13,16,18], emerging research suggests that physical activity may be employed to mitigate this dependency [25,27]. In particular, this aligns with research results indicating that aerobic exercise interventions reduced the desire for mobile phone use among university students with high mobile phone dependency [33] and identifying that exercise negatively predicted smartphone addiction [34]. Our study provides support for this notion; furthermore, the findings underscore the severity of the decline in exercise time with increasing age, which in turn leads to an increase in smartphone dependency, negatively affecting happiness levels among adolescents.…”

The Use of Wearable Monitoring Devices in Sports Sciences in COVID Years (2020–2022): A Systematic Review

“…Within these studies, the objectives varied, with 7 studies concentrating on assessing the reliability and accuracy of devices, while the remaining 29 utilized smart technology as a means of data collection. Various studies have performed interventions in their research using or monitoring with wearable devices [14,16,17,23,26,37,42,45]. Two papers examined the correlation between physical activity or sport and the COVID-19 pandemic using wearables [26,46].…”