Abstract
Mobile phone addiction is a universal phenomenon that has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Previous researches revealed a significant relation between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and addiction. This study further investigated the association between ACEs and mobile phone addiction, and the mediating effects of attachment styles and interpersonal relationships. The cross-sectional design and multiple questionnaires, namely, the Revised Adverse Childhood Experience Questionnaire, the Mobile Phone Addiction Index, the Revised Adult Attachment Scale (AAS), and the Interpersonal Relationship Comprehensive Diagnostic Scale (IRCDS) were used in the sample of 345 university students. Correlation analysis revealed that adverse childhood experience, attachment anxiety, attachment avoidance, interpersonal relationship, and mobile phone addiction were significantly positively correlated with each other. Results of regression analysis showed that attachment style and interpersonal relationship played multiple mediation roles in the association between adverse childhood experience and mobile phone addiction. That is, (1) adverse childhood experience was positively related to mobile phone addiction, (2) both attachment anxiety and interpersonal relationship played partial and parallel mediating roles between adverse childhood experience and mobile phone addiction, and (3) attachment anxiety/avoidance and interpersonal relationship mediated the relationship between adverse childhood experience and mobile phone addiction sequentially. These results indicated that mobile phone addiction among college students who had adverse childhood experience can be relieved by way of the remission of attachment anxiety, reduction of attachment avoidance, and improvement of interpersonal relationship.
Highlights
Mobile phone is one of the greatest inventions in modern society and facilitates our lives in many different ways
The present study aims to investigate the relationship between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and problematic phone use and the role of adult attachment and interpersonal relationship
Results of skewness and kurtosis analysis revealed that the scores of mobile phone use, attachment anxiety, attachment avoidance, and interpersonal relationship were approximately normal distribution, while the score of ACE was positively
Summary
Mobile phone is one of the greatest inventions in modern society and facilitates our lives in many different ways. The excessive reliance on smartphone, called mobile phone addiction, causes compelling questions, which attracted a lot of attention in recent years (Salehan and Negahban, 2013; Demirci et al, 2015; Aljomaa et al, 2016; Enez Darcin et al, 2016). Intensive research demonstrated that the problematic use of mobile phone was associated with physical problems such as low sleep quality, muscular pain, and eye disease (De-Sola et al, 2017; Lee et al, 2017), and mental problems such as depression, anxiety, autism, attention deficithyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and low self-confidence (Elhai et al, 2016; Panova and Lleras, 2016; Brown et al, 2017; Berg et al, 2018; Thomée, 2018). Mobile phone is an important part of undergraduate life (Yen et al, 2009). The examination of mobile phone addiction in college students has great realistic significance
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