Abstract
Currently, mobile phones are widely used worldwide. Thus, phubbing rapidly became a common phenomenon in our social life. Phubbing is considered by the literature as a new form of technology-related addiction that may undermine interpersonal relationships and mental health. Our study contributed to exploring phubbers’ emotional activation as no other work has investigated it so far. Indeed, researchers have only explored phubbees’ but not phubbers’ emotional correlates. A sample of 419 Italian individuals (143 males) participated in our data collection on a voluntary basis. The results showed that phubbing is related to negative affects, but not to positive affects. Moreover, phubbing in both its components (i.e., communication disturbance, phone obsession) appeared to elicit an emotional activation similar to that of social media addiction. These findings may help in strengthening the discussion around the emotional consequences of virtual environment design, as well as the awareness about what happens at a relational level during phubbing.
Highlights
Our study aims to fill the gap currently present in the literature regarding the emotional activation of phubber and compare it with that of social media addiction (SMA)
As the observed discrepancies were not so large, apart from the PANAS score, in order to fully hinder generalizability, we considered our sample suitable to proceed with inferential analyses
The analysis showed that males and females did not have different scores in the communication disturbance dimension (t(417) = −0.47; p = 0.64), while a difference between males and females was captured for both phone obsession (t(417) = −3.67; p = 0.001; Cohen’s d = −0.38)
Summary
The disruptive impact of web-based communication drastically changed people’s way of socializing [1]. People can interact with many others at the same time regardless of the physical presence of the interactor, both in a synchronous or an asynchronous way [2]. In this sense, the “social situation” transcends physical space and can embrace both real and virtual environments [3,4]. More than half of the world’s population is using social media regularly [6]
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