The Effect of Depression on Smartphone Addiction: The Medicating Effects of Interpersonal Problem in Korean Adolescents
Abstract
Introduction Problematic smartphone use is twice as common among teenagers as it is among adults. Smartphone addiction is associated with anxiety, depression, attention deficit disorder, impulsivity, and sleep problems, among other issues. Objectives To assess whether interpersonal relationship problems mediate the relationship between smartphone addiction and depression among adolescents (ages 12-17) currently enrolled in middle and high school. Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted among 653 middle and high school students living in Wonju, South Korea between September 1 and November 30, 2019. Depression was measured by Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D). In order to evaluate smartphone addiction, the Smartphone Addiction Scale Short Form Version (SAS-SV) was used. To examine interpersonal problems, the Korea Inventory of Interpersonal Problems Circumplex scale (KIIP-SC) was employed. We used the dplyr package to check for skew, kurtosis, and create density plots. Scatterplots and Pearson correlation analysis were used to examine the relationships between the main variables. For the mediation analysis, we used the 8 sub-scales of KIIP-SC (Domineering, Vindictive, Cold, Socially avoidant, Nonassertive, Exploitable, Overly Nurturant, Intrusive) as mediators and conducted a mediation analysis with 10,000 bootstrap samples using the lavaan package in R, version 4.2.2. Each analysis was evaluated based on a 95% confidence interval to determine…
How strong is the evidence?
Evidence Hub reads this as a cross-sectional, done in people. Its evidence level is 4 of 5 (Low · observational). Observational designs can show an association but not prove cause.
Read the paper
Related studies
- The neurocircuitry of addiction: an overview
- Gender Differences in Human Brain: A Review
- Stratified medicine for mental disorders
- The neurobiology of drug addiction: cross-species insights into the dysfunction and recovery of the prefrontal cortex
- Annual Research Review: DNA methylation as a mediator in the association between risk exposure and child and adolescent psychopathology
- Schizophrenia: The new etiological synthesis
Go deeper in Evidence Hub
Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.