Frontiers in Psychiatry is teasing a new study out of the Chuzhou University of China, concerning the impact of smartphone addiction on mental health and life satisfaction.

The study involved 322 college undergraduates, 48.4% female, 51.6% male. The students were evaluated for smartphone addiction based on the Mobile Phone Addiction Index (MPAI). The assessment is described in a 2022 research report in Frontiers in Psychology:

This scale contains 17 items and 4 subscales: Inability to Control Craving, Anxiety and Feeling Lost, Withdrawal and Escape, and Productivity Loss. Each item of the MPAI was rated on a 5-point Likert scale (with 1 = not at all and 5 = always). A higher MPAI score reflects greater levels of mobile phone addiction.

The full study has not yet been released. We do not know if the students were chosen because they were in treatment for smartphone addiction at the time of the study.

The mental health of students was evaluated using two standards assessments. The first is the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), which was published 40 years ago in the Journal of Personality Assessment. The assessment is remarkably simple and quite stable over time. It uses a 7-point Likert scale of strongly agree, agree, slightly agree, neutral/neither, slightly disagree, disagree, strongly disagree. The five questions are as follows:

____ In most ways my life is close to my ideal. 

____ The conditions of my life are excellent.

____ I am satisfied with my life.

____ So far I have gotten the important things I want in life.

____ If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing.

It’s interesting to note that the SWLS has mostly positive statements that people either align with or not. The other assessments contain largely negative statements. There is the potential for bias induced with either method. Also, even though they use Likert scales, these scales are subtly different, with the first graduating from “always” to “not at all,” and the second from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.”

I mention these biases because the scoring of the SWLS seems somewhat rigid and arbitrary to me. 

• 31 – 35 = Extremely satisfied 
• 26 – 30 = Satisfied 
• 21 – 25 = Slightly satisfied 
•        20 = Neutral 
• 15 – 19 = Slightly dissatisfied 
• 10 – 14 = Dissatisfied 
•   5  –  9 = Extremely dissatisfied 

For example, a score of 20 is “neutral,” but if you answered “neutral” to those five questions, I would suspect that you are “dissatisfied” with your life. And why are the brackets evenly spaced when a randomized distribution or natural distribution would never lead to such an outcome? The SWLS is copyrighted, but I am allowed to quote it as long as I include this copyright notice and the citation, below, to the Journal of Personality Assessment.

The undergrads were also assessed using the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-21 (DASS21). The 21-question assessment returns a scoring for three different emotional states: depression, anxiety, and tension/stress. A 4-point scale is used that goes from “Does not apply to me” to “Applies to me most of the time.” Of the 21 questions, seven are coded for depression, seven for anxiety, and seven for tension/stress.

I’m not going to list the whole DASS21 here, but I will provide a link to the PDF that shows all the questions and the scale. The questions, unlike the positive SWLS assessment, are all negative states. Just reading them can give you the creeps. Some examples:

• I couldn’t seem to experience any positive feeling at all
• I felt that I had nothing to look forward to
• I felt I wasn’t worth much as a person

So how did our smartphone-addicted undergrads undergrads make out?

Results revealed that smartphone addiction was significantly positively correlated with negative emotions, while negative emotions were significantly negatively correlated with life satisfaction.

Perhaps because of the ways these surveys are designed, the researchers found that the more addicted to their phone a person is, the greater their negative emotions, and the greater their negative emotions, the lower their life satisfaction. They found that depression was a lever that both intensified smartphone addiction and decreased life satisfaction. Researchers concluded:

Students with higher levels of smartphone addiction reported heightened negative emotions, leading to more pessimistic coping strategies and, ultimately, a decline in mental health and life satisfaction.

I would really like to see all the details on this study. When it is fully published, I will get back into it. Past studies of smartphone addiction show the harmful effects begin with sleep disruption. Disrupting the sleep cycle by remaining active on a smartphone during the night can significantly damage stress management capabilities.

If you feel you’re experiencing smartphone addiction, it is recommended that you try to gradually limit your time online, especially in the overnight hours, until you can achieve a manageable level of use. Other strategies include deleting apps and using dumb phones.

Written by Steve O’Keefe. First published March 3, 2025.

Sources:

“The Impact of Smartphone Addiction on Mental Health and Its Relationship with Life Satisfaction in the Post-COVID-19 Era,” Frontiers in Psychiatry, Accepted February 18, 2025.

“The mobile phone addiction index: Cross gender measurement invariance in adolescents,” Frontiers in Psychology, July 18, 2022.

“The Satisfaction With Life Scale,” Journal of Personality Assessment, February 1985.

“Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-21 (DASS21),” Addiction Research Center, retrieved in February, 2025.

Image Copyright: ocusfocus.