Brief Mindfulness Training Mitigates College Students' Mobile Phone Addiction: The Mediating Effect of the Sense of Meaning in Life

Psychol Res Behav Manag. 2024 Jan 26:17:273-282. doi: 10.2147/PRBM.S439360. eCollection 2024.

Abstract

Objective: To explore the impact of brief mindfulness training on college students' mobile phone addiction and the mediating effect of the sense of meaning in life between them.

Methods: This study has employed the mixed experimental design of 2 (experimental conditions) × 2 (time points), randomly assigned 44 college students into a mindfulness training group and a control group (22 college students in each group), and selected the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory (FMI), Mobile Phone Addiction Tendency Scale (MPATS), and Chinese Meaning in Life Questionnaire (C-MLQ) to conduct separate tests before and after mindfulness training.

Results: The results show that: (1) in the pretest, the differences between the mindfulness training group and the control group in the level of mindfulness, the level of mobile phone addiction, and the sense of meaning in life are not statistically significant; (2) in the posttest, compared with those of the control group, both the FMI score (p=0.013) and the C-MLQ score (p<0.001) of the mindfulness training group improve significantly, while the MPATS score (p=0.008) of the mindfulness training group declines significantly; and (3) the Bootstrap analysis of the mediating effect shows that after the change in C-MLQ (95% CI [0.537, 11.630]) enters the equation, the direct effect of mindfulness training is not significant (95% CI [-3.254, 5.861]).

Conclusion: The results of this study reveal the impact and mechanism of brief mindfulness training on college students' mobile phone addiction, and provide an empirical basis for intervening on mobile phone addiction.

Keywords: brief mindfulness; mediating effect; mobile phone addiction; sense of meaning in life.

Grants and funding

This study was supported by Research of Educational Science Planning in Henan Province“A Study on Brief Psychological Intervention for Mental Health of College Students in Henan Province”, (2023YB0105). The funders provided support for the preparation and publication of this paper.