Dynamic Associations And Psychological Mechanisms Between Depressive Symptoms And Mobile Phone Addiction In College Students

With the advent of the “digital” era,the generally exposure of young people,mainly college students,to a variety of digital media will not only has a negative impact on their mental health,but also leads to an increased risk of addiction to the Internet or electronic devices.As two representative aspects of this relationship,depressive symptoms and mobile phone addiction not only have a cross-sectional correlation,but may also have longitudinal dynamic interaction.College students are in the critical transition period from adolescence to early adulthood,during which various individual and situational factors may influence the relationship between depressive symptoms and mobile phone addiction.Therefore,the first study of this thesis will first examine the developmental trajectory of college students’ depressive symptoms and mobile phone addiction over time,and then investigate whether there is a bidirectional influence between them.Individual development is inseparable from the necessary psychological and physiological factors.Previous studies have shown that individual depressive symptoms and mobile phone addiction are correlated with internal psychological feelings and external physiological functions.For example,feelings of loneliness or suffering from sleep disorders can both affect the relationship between depressive symptoms and mobile phone addiction(Luo et al.,2019;Nie & Yang,2019).Even so,the relationship between these variables and their mechanisms still needs to be further investigated.Consequently,the second study examined the role of loneliness and sleep problems in the association between depressive symptoms and mobile phone addiction.In this study,a total of 3,827 college students(2019 males and 1808 females)were chosen through cluster sampling from universities in Guangdong province,and they were tracked for four times during two years.At each time point,depressive symptoms,loneliness,sleep problems and mobile phone addiction were measured using the College Students’ Mental Health Status Questionnaire compiled by our research group.In the first study,the latent growth model was first used to investigate the developmental trajectories of depressive symptoms and mobile phone addiction in college students,and then cross-lagged panel model(CLPM)and random intercept cross-lagged panel model(RI-CLPM)were conducted to model the relationship between the two variables.In the second study,CLPM and RI-CLPM were also utilized,and loneliness and sleep problems were added respectively to investigate their mediating role between depressive symptoms and mobile phone addiction.The main results of this study showed that:(1)Depressive symptoms and mobile phone addiction of college students showed a downward trend with the development of time,among which the depressive symptoms showed a curve downward trend(slope =-0.566,p<0.001),and mobile phone showed a linear downward trend(slope =-1.506,p<0.001);(2)Depressive symptoms and mobile phone addiction are stable across time,and there is a bidirectional mutual predictive relationship between them,which had been proved for both CLPM and RICLPM;(3)Loneliness and sleep problems could play a longitudinal mediating role between depressive symptoms and mobile phone addiction.In conclusion,the results of this study indicate the changing trends and their mutual predictive relationship of depressive symptoms and mobile phone addiction in college students.In addition,loneliness and sleep problems play an important role in the interaction of depressive symptoms and mobile phone addiction,and are necessary psychological mechanisms between them.Therefore,this thesis not only illustrates the interaction pattern between college students’ mental health and digital media addiction,but also highlights the longitudinal role of loneliness and sleep problems in this association.The mediating effect provides a certain reference and guidance for the future intervention of college students’ mental health work and addiction problems.