New research suggests that cell phone addiction is actually due to the social interactions that cell phones enable, rather than the phones themselves. This conclusion is supported by an experiment involving 86 participants, refuting the common view of mobile phone addiction. The study confirms a theory proposed by Professor Samuel P.L. Veissière in 2018, observing increased levels of anxiety and arousal in participants deprived of their phones, especially those addicted to social interaction.
A research team from the University of Granada (UGR) has proven that it is not the mobile phones themselves that people are "addicted to" but the social interactions they facilitate. The study, recently published in the journal Psicothema, provides the first experimental scientific support for a theory originally proposed in 2018 by Samuel P.L. Veissière, a scholar at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
To conduct the experiment, scientists from the Federal Institute of Geosciences and Natural Resources sampled 86 subjects, who were divided into two groups.
"In one of the groups (the social desirability group), we instructed each subject to send a message via WhatsApp to their most active contacts explaining that they would be participating in an exciting task in a virtual reality world (the same message in all cases)," explains Jorge Lopez-Puga, a researcher in the Department of Personality, Assessment and Psychotherapy at the University of Glasgow and lead author of the study.
The other group (the control group) was not asked to send this "exciting" message to their contacts. "Next, we asked both groups to turn off notifications and place their phones face down on the table while immersed in a virtual reality environment while engaging in an unusual activity. When interaction with the VR task was over, we left participants idle and unable to use their phones." "After this period of inactivity, we allowed all participants to return to WhatsApp," the researchers noted.
Throughout the process, scientists from the Federal Institute of Geosciences and Natural Resources measured the skin's electrodermal activity, a parameter thought to be an indicator of the activity of our autonomic nervous system, a physiological measure of anxiety.
"We observed that people in the social desirability group were more nervous throughout the experiment. We also found that this group was more anxious when they were asked to stop using their phones. Furthermore, this group was significantly more aroused when they were allowed to use their phones again," Lopez-Puga said.
Research results show that mobile phones are not the cause of psychological problems, but the way and reasons for using mobile phones can better explain some psychological problems.
Compiled source: ScitechDaily