Mobıle Phone Usage And Addıctıon
ABSTRACT
The objective of this study is to look for a relationship between mobile phone usage and addiction in terms of thought suppression and values. Our hypothesis is that mobile phone usage is an addiction which is increased by thought suppression techniques, and decreased by values. Towards this end, 20 participants (10 males and 10 females) were in thought suppression group while 20 participants (10 males and 10 females) were in values group. Before the study, each participant was given an addiction questionnaire, a paper which explains impairments of excessive mobile phone usage, and tally-mark sheet. Separately, for thought suppression group, a thought suppression paper was given to distract themselves with other activities from mobile phone usage. For values group, a values paper was given to contact them with their values. After two days of the study, second questionnaire was given to both groups. An independent sample t-test was employed with the scores of two days of mobile phone usage. The results showed that there was a significant relationship between mobile phone usage and thought suppression and values techniques. Thus, these results suggested the possibility that mobile phone usage is an addiction. However, despite the previous literature results, we found that mobile phone usage was increased by values techniques, and decreased by thought suppression techniques. Based on these results of the study, Terror Management Theory was rejected.
Addiction is defined as an unusually high dependence on a particular medium (Peele, 1985). According to Latkin (2010), addictive behaviors occur due to environmental forces over which a person has limited volitional control. That is, the person cannot stop his/her behaviors when he/she should stop despite the awareness of the unwanted condition. (Latkin, 2010). While experiencing addiction, addict people also show different kinds of symptoms of it, including dependence (physiological and/or psychological), craving, loss of control, tolerance and withdrawal (APA, 2000). Apart from the basic features of addiction, it has several types of it such as smoking, drinking, excessive mobile phone usage, etc.
Addiction consists of different additive behaviors which negatively affect human health. One such addiction which may be problematic is that excessive mobile phone usage. Mobile phone usage has lots of impairments that occur when used excessively, because mobile phone transmits and receives microwave radiation and has high frequency electromagnetic fields (EMFs) which lead them to cause biological impairments on people. Biological impairments resulting from excessive mobile phone usage can appear on brain (e.g. deficits in memory), eyes (e.g. visual impairments), ears (e.g. hearing problems), sexual organs (e.g. impotence) and so on (Repacholi, 2001).
Due to the serious side effects of mobile phone usage, it should not be used excessively. If people continue to use their mobile phones more than needed, their health will be threatened and they will experience negative consequences of mobile phone addiction. However, if they can change their behaviors because of these health-threatened side effects, this behavior change can be explained by a theory called Terror Management Theory (TMT) which is used in order to figure out the fear of people in terms of the negative consequences of their behaviors. This theory suggests that all human behavior is motivated by the fear of mortality. This means that if the message given terrorizes the people, they more likely change their behaviors, because the negative effects of mobile phone usage continue to threat people’s health if they do not care about their own mortality. Furthermore, several study support that TMT posits that reminders of mortality increase the need to defend and strengthen one’s worldview to sustain its anxiety-buffering function (Shehryar & Hunt, 2005). The theory might help to reduce the level of mobile phone usage by giving people fear of impairments resulted from excessive usage. Also, different desired qualities of people can help them to behave more deliberately such as family, health, etc.
Hayes and Pierson (2007) stated that desired qualities of ongoing behavioral events are values of people, and they cannot be accepted as a concrete object. Values are determined by people’s life direction. For instance, being loved from others can be a value of a person, and that person behaves accordingly to maintain this value, which represents the goal of the person (reaching the value) (Hayes & Pierson, 2007). Correspondingly, it can be said that people can reduce the amount of their mobile phone usage due to their values.
In addition to values, Hooper et al. (2011) explained that another coping strategy for staying away from any kind of addiction is thought suppression. Thought suppression is basically trying not to think of a specific/unwanted thought in order to control addictive behavior/thought, but paradoxically produces rebound effect after it ends. The result of this study indicated that the participants in thought suppression group ate more chocolate than those in control group (Hooper et al., 2011). Therefore, unlike values, thought suppression technique might lead people to increase their mobile phone usage.
Based on the information mentioned above, we want to study whether mobile phone usage is an addictive behavior in terms of thought suppression and values. This will show the fact that people experience the features of addiction during the given period of time despite the impairments of excessive mobile phone usage. We hypothesize that people are addicted to use their mobile phones. If they could stop using mobile phone for two days during the study, they will not be considered as addicts, and they use it because of the daily necessity. On the contrary, if they could not stop their usage when they said so, they will be considered as addicted to their mobile phone. More specifically, we want to examine the effects of thought suppression and values techniques on addictive behaviors. That means; values will help people to decrease their mobile phone usage whereas thought suppression will increase their mobile phone usage.
METHOD
Participants
Forty volunteer participants from Middle East Technical University Northern Cyprus Campus (METU NCC) undergraduate student population was used in the experiment. Participants’ age range was 18-25. There was a thought suppression group which consists of 10 males and 10 females (M = 22, SD = 1.48). Values group also involved 10 males and 10 females (M = 21.6, SD = 1.88). Each participant was randomly selected for each group.
Measures
Addiction Questionnaire. Both groups received a questionnaire which measures addiction. There were thirty-three questions some of which were taken from addiction questionnaires (Lister, 2010), while some of them were designed for the purpose of this study. Questions included dependence of mobile phone, craving and withdrawal symptoms, loss of control and tolerance, which are related the features of addiction. Participants were asked to indicate their agreement on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 (never) to 5 (always) with such items as ‘‘Do you think that life is boring without your mobile phone?’’, ‘‘I feel safer myself with my mobile phone,’’ and ‘‘It is not hard to stay away from my mobile phone when I have work to do’’.
Control Questionnaire. The second questionnaire was given to the both groups. First question was: ‘‘Have you experienced anything unusual to use your mobile phone more/less than usual during the last 2 days?’’. Since, if there was an extreme situation, this would not be an addiction, instead this would be a necessity. The second question was: ‘What techniques did you use to stop using your mobile phone?’’. Additionally, they rated their mobile phone usage on 10-points Likert scale, how much they used their respective interventions
Tally-mark Sheet. Both groups were asked to mark on a specific paper -which we designed- every time they used their mobile phones for two days.
Design
An independent sample t-test was employed with the scores of each group (thought suppression and values) on addiction questionnaire, control questionnaire and tally-mark sheet.
Procedure
Both groups received an informed consent and information sheet about the experiment. However, in this information sheet, addiction was not mentioned in order to eliminate bias in case the participants could not direct their responses based on the experiment. Then, both groups received an addiction questionnaire, and a paper about the negative consequences of mobile phone usage.
Followingly, thought suppression group received a thought suppression paper which shows the ways of distracting themselves, suppressing their thoughts, or focusing on another activity rather than using their mobile phones. Then, they wrote down all of the possible distracters that might be helpful in their attempts. Values group, on the other hand, received a values paper which helps them to contact with their values; such as family, career, etc. Also, they wrote down all possible reasons why their health is important to them.
Then both groups asked to stop their usage as much as possible, and both groups also asked to mark on a tally-mark paper every time they used their mobile phone for following two days. In these two days, participants were free, and they were not observed. After two days, data was collected and both groups were asked the second questionnaire. Finally participants received verbal debriefing about the exact aim of the study.
RESULT
N M SD
Thought suppression 18 20,5000 17,55077
Values 18 40,1667 18,83442
Participants in the current study recorded the amount of times they used their phone over a two day period. 2 out of 20 scores of thought suppression group were found extreme (M = 418,5) whereas 2 out of 20 scores of values group were found extreme (M = 188). Thus, these scores were omitted. The results of these recordings can be seen in table 1.
Table 1
Group Statistics
For the first day, the participants in thought suppression group (M = 11,06) signaled that they used their mobile phones slightly less than those in the values group (M = 21,22). The scores in the second day resembled those for the first day (thought suppression = M = 9,44; values = M = 18,94). In addition, the total scores of the participants indicated that the mean scores of the thought suppression (M = 20,5) were significantly lesser than those in the values group (M = 40,17).
In order to determine whether any significant differences occurred between the thought suppression and values groups, an independent samples t-test was conducted on the data. It revealed significant effect; t(34) = -3,241; p>0.05. This result suggests that there was significant difference in phone usage between the thought suppression and values groups.
DISCUSSION
Our hypothesis was that mobile phone usage is an addiction which is increased by thought suppression techniques, and decreased by values. According to results excessive mobile phone usage is not necessity among the university students, it is addiction. The study showed that thought suppression group could not reduce the among of mobile phone usage even if they were informed about negative effects of mobile phones and asked to reduce using it for two days . This resulted that Terror Management Theory did not work on this study although it suggests creating fear on people, and changing the behaviors of them. Results also showed that there was a significant relationship between mobile phone usage and thought suppression and values techniques.
Mobile phone usage was increased by values techniques, and decreased by thought suppression techniques. Participants were given a survey before the study in order to measure their attitudes toward mobile phone usage. This survey showed that university students used their mobile phones more likely to send text messages to their friends or boyfriends/girlfriends. Moreover the survey showed that students do not believe that they use their mobile phones excessively although the study showed the opposite. In order to conduct the study, participants were given a paper to record their daily amount of mobile phone usage after the survey. The survey and the paper for recording the daily amount of mobile phone usage were very helpful for showing habitual behaviors of students in terms of the daily amount of mobile phone usage, the purpose and the addictive side of it. These results gave us a better understanding about mobile phone usage among university students to realize their thoughts about their behaviors and the actual behaviors. So there are some strengths and limitations of the study.
Firstly, examination of mobile phone addiction in a more broad way is one of the strength of this study. It is not only emphasized the texting and calling it also included the other functioning of the mobile phone. Additionally this is the only research about addictive behavior of mobile phone with Turkish sample. Beside of these strengths there are some limitations. First of all participants may forget to record their daily amount of usage of mobile phone. Whenever they used it, they had to tick up on the paper for two days; for that reason, we did not have a chance to observe their behaviors during this period. So the study had some control limitations. Another limitation is that participants we used were only from the university campus. Therefore, this research results cannot be generalized to the population. With more representative sample of the population should be used for a better understanding. However, larger amount of participants and more structured methods can eliminate these limitations.
REFERENCES
American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and statisticalmanual of mental disorders
(4th ed., text revision). Washington, DC: Author.
Hooper, N., Sandoz, E. K., Ashton, J., Clarke, A. & McHugh, L. (2011). Comparing thought
suppression and acceptance as coping techniques for food cravings. Eating Behaviors, doi:10.1016/j.eatbeh.2011.10.002.
Latkin, C. (2010). Compass or blinders: The role of theory in studying health behaviors and
addiction. Addiction, 105, 1893–1898.
Peele, S.(1985). The meaning of addiction. Lexington Books, Lexington, M.A.
Pierson, H., & Hayes, S. C. (2007). Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to empower the
therapeutic relationship. In P. Gilbert & R. Leahy (Eds.), The Therapeutic Relationship in Cognitive Behavior Therapy (pp. 205-228). London: Routledge.
Repacholi, M. H.(2001). Health risks from the use of mobile phones. World Health
Organization, 120, 323-331.
Shehryar, O. & Hunt, D. M. (2005). A terror management perspective on the persuasiveness of
fear appeals. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 15(4), 275-287.
The objective of this study is to look for a relationship between mobile phone usage and addiction in terms of thought suppression and values. Our hypothesis is that mobile phone usage is an addiction which is increased by thought suppression techniques, and decreased by values. Towards this end, 20 participants (10 males and 10 females) were in thought suppression group while 20 participants (10 males and 10 females) were in values group. Before the study, each participant was given an addiction questionnaire, a paper which explains impairments of excessive mobile phone usage, and tally-mark sheet. Separately, for thought suppression group, a thought suppression paper was given to distract themselves with other activities from mobile phone usage. For values group, a values paper was given to contact them with their values. After two days of the study, second questionnaire was given to both groups. An independent sample t-test was employed with the scores of two days of mobile phone usage. The results showed that there was a significant relationship between mobile phone usage and thought suppression and values techniques. Thus, these results suggested the possibility that mobile phone usage is an addiction. However, despite the previous literature results, we found that mobile phone usage was increased by values techniques, and decreased by thought suppression techniques. Based on these results of the study, Terror Management Theory was rejected.
Addiction is defined as an unusually high dependence on a particular medium (Peele, 1985). According to Latkin (2010), addictive behaviors occur due to environmental forces over which a person has limited volitional control. That is, the person cannot stop his/her behaviors when he/she should stop despite the awareness of the unwanted condition. (Latkin, 2010). While experiencing addiction, addict people also show different kinds of symptoms of it, including dependence (physiological and/or psychological), craving, loss of control, tolerance and withdrawal (APA, 2000). Apart from the basic features of addiction, it has several types of it such as smoking, drinking, excessive mobile phone usage, etc.
Addiction consists of different additive behaviors which negatively affect human health. One such addiction which may be problematic is that excessive mobile phone usage. Mobile phone usage has lots of impairments that occur when used excessively, because mobile phone transmits and receives microwave radiation and has high frequency electromagnetic fields (EMFs) which lead them to cause biological impairments on people. Biological impairments resulting from excessive mobile phone usage can appear on brain (e.g. deficits in memory), eyes (e.g. visual impairments), ears (e.g. hearing problems), sexual organs (e.g. impotence) and so on (Repacholi, 2001).
Due to the serious side effects of mobile phone usage, it should not be used excessively. If people continue to use their mobile phones more than needed, their health will be threatened and they will experience negative consequences of mobile phone addiction. However, if they can change their behaviors because of these health-threatened side effects, this behavior change can be explained by a theory called Terror Management Theory (TMT) which is used in order to figure out the fear of people in terms of the negative consequences of their behaviors. This theory suggests that all human behavior is motivated by the fear of mortality. This means that if the message given terrorizes the people, they more likely change their behaviors, because the negative effects of mobile phone usage continue to threat people’s health if they do not care about their own mortality. Furthermore, several study support that TMT posits that reminders of mortality increase the need to defend and strengthen one’s worldview to sustain its anxiety-buffering function (Shehryar & Hunt, 2005). The theory might help to reduce the level of mobile phone usage by giving people fear of impairments resulted from excessive usage. Also, different desired qualities of people can help them to behave more deliberately such as family, health, etc.
Hayes and Pierson (2007) stated that desired qualities of ongoing behavioral events are values of people, and they cannot be accepted as a concrete object. Values are determined by people’s life direction. For instance, being loved from others can be a value of a person, and that person behaves accordingly to maintain this value, which represents the goal of the person (reaching the value) (Hayes & Pierson, 2007). Correspondingly, it can be said that people can reduce the amount of their mobile phone usage due to their values.
In addition to values, Hooper et al. (2011) explained that another coping strategy for staying away from any kind of addiction is thought suppression. Thought suppression is basically trying not to think of a specific/unwanted thought in order to control addictive behavior/thought, but paradoxically produces rebound effect after it ends. The result of this study indicated that the participants in thought suppression group ate more chocolate than those in control group (Hooper et al., 2011). Therefore, unlike values, thought suppression technique might lead people to increase their mobile phone usage.
Based on the information mentioned above, we want to study whether mobile phone usage is an addictive behavior in terms of thought suppression and values. This will show the fact that people experience the features of addiction during the given period of time despite the impairments of excessive mobile phone usage. We hypothesize that people are addicted to use their mobile phones. If they could stop using mobile phone for two days during the study, they will not be considered as addicts, and they use it because of the daily necessity. On the contrary, if they could not stop their usage when they said so, they will be considered as addicted to their mobile phone. More specifically, we want to examine the effects of thought suppression and values techniques on addictive behaviors. That means; values will help people to decrease their mobile phone usage whereas thought suppression will increase their mobile phone usage.
METHOD
Participants
Forty volunteer participants from Middle East Technical University Northern Cyprus Campus (METU NCC) undergraduate student population was used in the experiment. Participants’ age range was 18-25. There was a thought suppression group which consists of 10 males and 10 females (M = 22, SD = 1.48). Values group also involved 10 males and 10 females (M = 21.6, SD = 1.88). Each participant was randomly selected for each group.
Measures
Addiction Questionnaire. Both groups received a questionnaire which measures addiction. There were thirty-three questions some of which were taken from addiction questionnaires (Lister, 2010), while some of them were designed for the purpose of this study. Questions included dependence of mobile phone, craving and withdrawal symptoms, loss of control and tolerance, which are related the features of addiction. Participants were asked to indicate their agreement on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 (never) to 5 (always) with such items as ‘‘Do you think that life is boring without your mobile phone?’’, ‘‘I feel safer myself with my mobile phone,’’ and ‘‘It is not hard to stay away from my mobile phone when I have work to do’’.
Control Questionnaire. The second questionnaire was given to the both groups. First question was: ‘‘Have you experienced anything unusual to use your mobile phone more/less than usual during the last 2 days?’’. Since, if there was an extreme situation, this would not be an addiction, instead this would be a necessity. The second question was: ‘What techniques did you use to stop using your mobile phone?’’. Additionally, they rated their mobile phone usage on 10-points Likert scale, how much they used their respective interventions
Tally-mark Sheet. Both groups were asked to mark on a specific paper -which we designed- every time they used their mobile phones for two days.
Design
An independent sample t-test was employed with the scores of each group (thought suppression and values) on addiction questionnaire, control questionnaire and tally-mark sheet.
Procedure
Both groups received an informed consent and information sheet about the experiment. However, in this information sheet, addiction was not mentioned in order to eliminate bias in case the participants could not direct their responses based on the experiment. Then, both groups received an addiction questionnaire, and a paper about the negative consequences of mobile phone usage.
Followingly, thought suppression group received a thought suppression paper which shows the ways of distracting themselves, suppressing their thoughts, or focusing on another activity rather than using their mobile phones. Then, they wrote down all of the possible distracters that might be helpful in their attempts. Values group, on the other hand, received a values paper which helps them to contact with their values; such as family, career, etc. Also, they wrote down all possible reasons why their health is important to them.
Then both groups asked to stop their usage as much as possible, and both groups also asked to mark on a tally-mark paper every time they used their mobile phone for following two days. In these two days, participants were free, and they were not observed. After two days, data was collected and both groups were asked the second questionnaire. Finally participants received verbal debriefing about the exact aim of the study.
RESULT
N M SD
Thought suppression 18 20,5000 17,55077
Values 18 40,1667 18,83442
Participants in the current study recorded the amount of times they used their phone over a two day period. 2 out of 20 scores of thought suppression group were found extreme (M = 418,5) whereas 2 out of 20 scores of values group were found extreme (M = 188). Thus, these scores were omitted. The results of these recordings can be seen in table 1.
Table 1
Group Statistics
For the first day, the participants in thought suppression group (M = 11,06) signaled that they used their mobile phones slightly less than those in the values group (M = 21,22). The scores in the second day resembled those for the first day (thought suppression = M = 9,44; values = M = 18,94). In addition, the total scores of the participants indicated that the mean scores of the thought suppression (M = 20,5) were significantly lesser than those in the values group (M = 40,17).
In order to determine whether any significant differences occurred between the thought suppression and values groups, an independent samples t-test was conducted on the data. It revealed significant effect; t(34) = -3,241; p>0.05. This result suggests that there was significant difference in phone usage between the thought suppression and values groups.
DISCUSSION
Our hypothesis was that mobile phone usage is an addiction which is increased by thought suppression techniques, and decreased by values. According to results excessive mobile phone usage is not necessity among the university students, it is addiction. The study showed that thought suppression group could not reduce the among of mobile phone usage even if they were informed about negative effects of mobile phones and asked to reduce using it for two days . This resulted that Terror Management Theory did not work on this study although it suggests creating fear on people, and changing the behaviors of them. Results also showed that there was a significant relationship between mobile phone usage and thought suppression and values techniques.
Mobile phone usage was increased by values techniques, and decreased by thought suppression techniques. Participants were given a survey before the study in order to measure their attitudes toward mobile phone usage. This survey showed that university students used their mobile phones more likely to send text messages to their friends or boyfriends/girlfriends. Moreover the survey showed that students do not believe that they use their mobile phones excessively although the study showed the opposite. In order to conduct the study, participants were given a paper to record their daily amount of mobile phone usage after the survey. The survey and the paper for recording the daily amount of mobile phone usage were very helpful for showing habitual behaviors of students in terms of the daily amount of mobile phone usage, the purpose and the addictive side of it. These results gave us a better understanding about mobile phone usage among university students to realize their thoughts about their behaviors and the actual behaviors. So there are some strengths and limitations of the study.
Firstly, examination of mobile phone addiction in a more broad way is one of the strength of this study. It is not only emphasized the texting and calling it also included the other functioning of the mobile phone. Additionally this is the only research about addictive behavior of mobile phone with Turkish sample. Beside of these strengths there are some limitations. First of all participants may forget to record their daily amount of usage of mobile phone. Whenever they used it, they had to tick up on the paper for two days; for that reason, we did not have a chance to observe their behaviors during this period. So the study had some control limitations. Another limitation is that participants we used were only from the university campus. Therefore, this research results cannot be generalized to the population. With more representative sample of the population should be used for a better understanding. However, larger amount of participants and more structured methods can eliminate these limitations.
REFERENCES
American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and statisticalmanual of mental disorders
(4th ed., text revision). Washington, DC: Author.
Hooper, N., Sandoz, E. K., Ashton, J., Clarke, A. & McHugh, L. (2011). Comparing thought
suppression and acceptance as coping techniques for food cravings. Eating Behaviors, doi:10.1016/j.eatbeh.2011.10.002.
Latkin, C. (2010). Compass or blinders: The role of theory in studying health behaviors and
addiction. Addiction, 105, 1893–1898.
Peele, S.(1985). The meaning of addiction. Lexington Books, Lexington, M.A.
Pierson, H., & Hayes, S. C. (2007). Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to empower the
therapeutic relationship. In P. Gilbert & R. Leahy (Eds.), The Therapeutic Relationship in Cognitive Behavior Therapy (pp. 205-228). London: Routledge.
Repacholi, M. H.(2001). Health risks from the use of mobile phones. World Health
Organization, 120, 323-331.
Shehryar, O. & Hunt, D. M. (2005). A terror management perspective on the persuasiveness of
fear appeals. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 15(4), 275-287.
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