The Role of Cognitive Emotion Regulation Strategies on Problematic Smartphone Use: Comparison between Problematic and Non-Problematic Adolescent Users

Abstract

Prior work has suggested that individuals with deficits in emotion regulation skills are prone to compulsive behaviour and to following maladaptive coping strategies, such as smartphone overuse, to manage negative moods. Adolescence is a vulnerable developmental stage for deficits in emotion regulation, and these are linked to excessive smartphone use. The present study is the first to examine the links between the use of specific cognitive emotion regulation (CER) strategies and problematic smartphone use in a sample of adolescents. A total of 845 Spanish adolescents (455 females) completed the Spanish versions of the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire and the Smartphone Addiction Scale, along with a socio-demographic survey. The adolescents were divided into two groups: Non-problematic smartphone users (n = 491, 58.1%) and problematic smartphone users (n = 354, 41.9%). Significant group differences were found, with the problematic users reporting significantly higher scores for all maladaptive CER strategies, including higher self-blame, rumination, blaming of others and catastrophising. The results from logistic regression analyses show that rumination, catastrophising and blaming of others were the most important variables for distinguishing between the two groups, along with gender and parental control outside the home. In summary, these findings suggest the importance of specific maladaptive CER strategies in problematic smartphone use and provide insight for relevant targets for intervention designs.

Associations between Problematic Smartphone Use, Unhealthy Behaviors, and Mental Health Status in Korean Adolescents: Based on Data from the 13th Korea Youth Risk Behavior Survey (2017)

“…[3][4][5] Compared to people of other age groups, adolescents, may be more vulnerable to the negative effects of smartphone use because they lack the ability to manage impulsive behaviors. 6 This problem is not limited to South Korea, as demonstrated by reports that 41.9% of Spanish adolescents 7 and 21.3% of Chinese adolescents 8 exhibited problematic smartphone use.…”

Knowledge of COVID-19 and Its Influence on Mindfulness, Cognitive Emotion Regulation and Psychological Flexibility in the Indian Community

“…A substantial amount of research findings point to the fact that psychological well-being can be enhanced by the use of adaptive emotion regulation strategies (Extremera et al, 2019). According to those researchers, Garnefski and Kraaij (2007) posited that there are individual differences in the way different people self-monitor the effect of maladaptive emotions by using adaptive and maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies.…”

Emotional Regulation Difficulties, Personality, and Problematic Smartphone Use

“…They found that cognitive reappraisal, which can be both an effective and ineffective strategy for regulating emotional responses to negative events, was positively associated with heavier smartphone use, and heavy use of smartphones was associated with increased problematic use. Fu et al 13 and Extremera, Quintana-Orts [14] found similar results with an adolescent sample whereby emotion regulation difficulties were associated with greater problematic smartphone use. It may be that emotion regulation difficulties are associated with being more distressed and therefore an increase in reliance on smartphones for comfort, reassurance, or emotional distraction in lieu of more adaptive emotion management 37 .…”

“…Two proposed dispositional mechanisms are emotion regulation difficulties and personality. A poor ability to regulate emotional responses to negative experiences appears to be associated with greater problematic smartphone use in adults 6,11,12 and adolescents [13][14][15] . Similarly, broad personality traits, particularly high neuroticism and low conscientiousness, have also been found to predict greater problematic smartphone use [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] .…”