The relationship between anxiety and smartphone addiction in the context of Covid-19: The mediating effect of attentional control and executive dysfunction

Jiamin Ge; Ya Liu; Anbang Zhang; Tengyou Shu

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e13273

The relationship between anxiety and smartphone addiction in the context of Covid-19: The mediating effect of attentional control and executive dysfunction

Heliyon. 2023 Feb;9(2):e13273. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e13273. Epub 2023 Jan 31.

Authors

Jiamin Ge^{1

2}, Ya Liu^{1

2}, Anbang Zhang^{1

2}, Tengyou Shu^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ School of Educational Sciences, Chongqing Normal University, Chongqing, 401331, China.
² Key Laboratory of Applied Psychology, Chongqing Normal University, Chongqing, 401331, China.

Abstract

In the context of Covid-19, the present study examined the relationship between anxiety and smartphone addiction and tested the mediation role of attentional control and executive dysfunction. Four hundred and twenty-one Chinese undergraduate students completed anxiety, attentional control, executive dysfunction, and smartphone addiction measures. The findings of correlation analysis indicated that anxiety was negatively associated with attentional control, and positively with executive dysfunction and smartphone addiction. The results of structural equation model showed that attentional control and executive dysfunction played a mediation role between anxiety and smartphone addiction in series. Moreover, anxiety did not directly predict smartphone addiction in the final model including attentional control and executive dysfunction as mediators, suggesting that attentional control and executive dysfunction were full mediators in the relation between anxiety and smartphone addiction.

Keywords: Anxiety; Attentional control; Covid-19; Executive dysfunction; Smartphone addiction.