The Inhibitory Control Defects Of Mobile Phone Addicts

Mobile phone addiction refers to the uncontrolled use of mobile phone,which causes a series of psysiological,psychological and social problems,with the symptoms of withdrawal,tolerance,mood modification,etc.And it belongs to a kind of behavioral addicitons.Nowadays mobile phone addiction has been becoming a more and more common phenomenon in college students,which causes extensive attention of researchers.For now,the studies of mobile phone addiction at home and abroad pay more attention on the related questionnaires and ites influencing factors,such as demographic variables and personality traits.There are many scholars who attempted to develop the mobile phone addiction scales,however,there exists some problems,for instance,the consistency reliability of some subscales is low.Lin,a taiwan researcher,developed the Smartphone Addiction Inventory(SPAI),which is widely used in taiwan,meanwhile,some foreign scholars revised this scale.Therefore,in order to get the questionnaire with high reliability and validity,and meet the standard of psychological measurement,in the first study,the SPAI was revised to chinese mainland version in college students.Furthermore,previous research has found that inhibitory control ability is closed related to behaviors such as internet addiction and gambling addiciton,and addiciton bahaviors usually go with inhibitory control damage.Inhibitory control,as the kernel of executive function,refers to the suppression of prepotent response or habitual behavior,which allows flexible,intentional,behavioral reaction to the environment.Zelazo and Müller defined inhibitory control to ‘cool' inhibitory control and ‘hot' inhibitory control.‘Cool' inhibitory control often measured by the classic Stroop task and classic Go/Nogo task.The measurement of the ‘hot'inhibitory control usually adopt the emotional stimuli,for example,present some addiction-related words or pictures to addicts.Researchers have found that mobile phone addicits did show ‘cool' inhibitory control defects,however,we dont't know whether addicts has ‘hot' inhibitory control damage.So,the second study investigated the ability of mobile phone addicts' inhibitory control to phone-related words,that is,‘hot' inhibitory control.In the first study,540 students were invited to participate in the preliminary testing process.And then 419 students who took part in the formal testing process were asked to complete the mainland version of SPAI,at the same time,they were additional asked to complete Self-Esteem Scale(SES),UCLA Loneliness Scale and Mobile Phone Addiction Index(MPAI),in which 58 students were retested after 2 weeks.Results showed that the mainland version of SPAI consisted of 16 items and exploratory factor analysis yielded five factors: tolerance,withdrawal,compulsive behavior,sleep problems,and interpersonal problems.Confirmatory factor analysis showed that the five-factor model fitted well with the data(?2/df=2.546,CFI=0.921,TLI=0.899,RMSEA=0.061,SRMR=0.052).Besides,SPAI was positively correlated with loneliness(r=0.26)and MPAI(r=0.67),and was negatively correlated with the self-esteem(r=-0.23).The total scale of the internal consistency reliability,split-half reliability and test-retest reliability were 0.87,0.82,and 0.83,respectively.The second experiment we used phone-related Go/Nogo task,which is one factor(group: high mobile phone addiction,low mobile phone addiction)intergroup design.385 questionnaires were send out in SWU,in which we filtered 38 participants who scored in the top 27% of SPAI-R as group high addiction group,and selected 33 subjects who scored at the bottom of 27% of SPAI-R as low addiction group.All subjects had to perform the phone-related Go/Nogo task,then,they were assigned to complete the Barratt Implusiveness Scale(BIS)and Self-control Scale(SCS).It was found that there exists significant difference between groups in Nogo accuracy,the Nogo accuracy of high addiction group is lower than low addiction group,at the same time,Nogo accuracy had significant negative correlation with the score of SPAI-R.That is to say,‘hot' inhibitory control of college students with mobile phone addiction may have defects,‘hot' inhibitory control of college students with high mobile phone addiction are significantly lower than low addicts.The study 2 also found that in comparision to low addicts,high addicts has the poorer self-control ability and higher implusivity.Sum up above consequences,the conlusions are as follows:(1)The mainland version of SPAI is a reliable and valid instrument to assess the smartphone addiction of Chinese college students.(2)The mainland version of SPAI contains 16 items,and can be divided into five subscales: tolerance,withdrawal,compulsive behavior,interpersonal problems,and sleep problems.(3)In comparison to college students with low mobile phone addiction,high addicts demonstrated ‘hot' inhibition control deficits.(4)mobile phone addicts has the poorer self-control ability and higher implusivity.