The Self-control Defects In Mobile Phone Addictive College Students And Its Possible Mechanism

Self-control is very important for the individual’s adaptation and development. Previous research has found that self-control ability is closely related to behaviors such as smoking, drinking, over eating, drug addiction and Internet addiction etc., and self-control ability is an effective variable in predicting above behaviors. Mobile phone addiction as a social problem that appears in recent years has become a focus of attention of the society.Under the framework of self-control energy model, Baumeister defined self-control to trait self-control and state self-control. At present, the measurement of trait self-control is always using the self-control scale which was revised by Tan Shuhua and Guo Yongyu. In recent years the research of self-control is mainly on the energy model, Baumeister et al. proposed the energy model of self-control at first, which suggests that self-control depends on a limited energy and the energy will deplete when performing self-control, the defect state of Self-control was called "ego depletion". Dual task paradigm is adopted to investigate individuals’ self-control.Nowadays, mobile phone addiction has become hot point in our life. The previous researches on mobile phone addiction pay more attention on the mobile phone addiction questionnaire and the relationship between mobile phone addiction and certain personality traits. There is rarely research on self-control of mobile phone addictive subjects. The present research investigated the mobile phone addictive’self-control defects and the possible mechanism in college students, and explored the possible mechanism of the mobile phone addictive’self-control defects. This research included three studies, the first study investigated the mobile phone addictive’ trait self-control defects in college student, and the second study investigated the mobile phone addictive’ state self-control defects in college student through two experiments. The last one investigated the possible mechanism of the mobile phone addictive’self-control defects in college students.In the first study, we screened subjects with mobile phone addiction through mobile phone addiction index scale, screening128normal subjects and90subjects with mobile phone addiction subjects. And then we administered self-control questionnaire to two types of students respectively, exploring the mobile phone additive’s trait self-control defects in college student. The result shows that the trait self-control of college students with mobile phone addiction has defects, trait self-control ability of college students with mobile phone addiction are significantly lower than normal students.There were two experiments in study2.The first experiment used the dual task paradigm, we adopted experimental design of2(college students with mobile phone addiction vs. normal university students)×2(ego depletion vs. non-ego depletion) to investigate the state self-control defects of mobile phone addiction college students. Firstly we screened of54normal subjects and40mobile phone addiction subjects with mobile phone addiction index scale, all subjects were randomly assigned to ego depletion or non-ego depletion conditions, and then complete depletion aftereffect task. This experiment used emotion inhibition task as ego depletion task, and delays discounting task as independence. The results showed that the main effect of ego depletion and interaction is significant. Further simple effects analysis revealed that under the ego depletion condition, the state self-control of college students with mobile phone addiction has defects, and under the non-ego depletion conditions, the college students with mobile phone addiction’ state self-control had not been significantly different with ordinary students.The second experiment we used2(Mobile phone addiction college students Vs. Ordinary university students) X2(ego depletion Vs. non-ego depletion) design, screening of50normal subjects and42mobile phone addiction subjects through mobile phone addiction index scale, investigating the state self-control defects of college students with mobile phone addiction, and further investigated the effect of emotion on the state self-control defects of college students with mobile phone addiction. After completing the questionnaires, all subjects had to perform the Stroop task as a pretesting, then, they were randomly assigned to the ego depletion or non-ego depletion condition, finally, there was a Stroop task as a posttest. It was found that there was no significant difference between mobile phone addiction college students and ordinary students. The simple effects analysis of the posttest of Stroop task found that, under non-ego depletion condition, there was no significant differences between the two kinds of subjects; under the ego depletion condition, the performance of college students with mobile phone addiction was worse than ordinary students, in other words, the state self-control ability of mobile phone addiction college students was poorer. The result of study2showed that under the ego depletion condition, the state self-control ability of college students with mobile phone addiction has defects, while in the non-ego depletion condition, the college students with mobile phone addiction’ state self-control had not been significantly different with ordinary students; The result of emotion showed that the college students with mobile phone addiction’ emotion had not been significantly different with ordinary students before ego depleted, then after ego depleted, the college students with mobile phone addiction’ negative emotions were higher than normal students.Based on the second study, in the third study we would like to explore the mechanism underlying such defects. We screened of84mobile phone addiction subjects through mobile phone addiction index scale. Aiming at this issue, we specially designed an inter-subjects experiment, with emotion induction (positive vs. neutral), self-control energy (ego depletion vs. non-ego depletion) as the independent variables, all subjects were evoked positive emotions or neutral emotions after depletes or non-depleted task, and the performance on the Stroop task as the dependent variable. It revealed.that, compared with the negative emotion evoking, positive emotion evoking offseted the negative emotion caused by the self-control depletion, and then boosted the performance on the self-control task (the Stroop task). According to the results, it is probably that, the defect of mobile phone addictive students’self-control ability is caused by the negative emotion caused by self-control depletion.According to the research, we came to the following conclusions:(1) there is trait self-control defects among college students with mobile phone addiction, the addicts are lower state self-control ability.(2) There is state self-control defects among college students with mobile phone addiction, the addicts are lower state self-control ability.(3) Under the framework of self-control energy model, it may be the negative emotion evoked after self-control depletion that leads to the mobile phone addictive students’ self-control defects.