key: cord-1053592-mdghxx9p
authors: Peng, Yu; Zhou, Huiling; Zhang, Bin; Mao, Huili; Hu, Rongting; Jiang, Huaibin
title: Perceived stress and Mobile phone addiction among college students during the 2019 coronavirus disease: The mediating roles of rumination and the moderating role of self-control.
date: 2021-08-20
journal: Pers Individ Dif
DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2021.111222
sha: 0ef84b55d97fb061e23961ee3213f6aefb4c6cf3
doc_id: 1053592
cord_uid: mdghxx9p

This present study aimed to examine the mediating role of rumination and the moderating role of self-control in the link between perceived stress and mobile phone addiction during the COVID-19 epidemic. A total of 628 college students completed Depression-Anxiety-Stress Scale, Smartphone Addiction Scale, Ruminative Responses Scale and Self-Control Scale. Mediation analysis highlighted that rumination mediated the association between perceived stress and mobile phone addiction. Moderated mediation analysis indicated that the indirect association between perceived stress and mobile phone addiction were moderated by self-control. Between the COVID affected group and the unaffected group, some differences also be observed in the moderating effect of self-control. This study emphasize the importance of rumination and self-control in understanding the possible mechanisms underlying the relationship between perceived stress and mobile phone addiction, which can be used to develop interventions to reduce the problematic behavior among college students during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Perceived stress may have effects on mobile phone addiction through the mediating role of rumination, however, individuals are not equally impacted by perceived stress. As a stable personality trait, self-control is defined as an ability to regulate, manipulate, or control one's impulsive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (Telzer, Masten, Berkman, Lieberman, & Fuligni, 2011) . Previous studies have explored the moderating effect of self-control between environmental factors (i.e., mass media, parental support) and problematic behaviors (i.e., tobacco and alcohol use, antisocial behavior) (Jones, Cauffman, & Piquero, 2007; Wills, Gibbons, Sargent, Gerrard, Lee, & Dal Cin, 2010) , however, rare studies have examined its moderating role between perceived stress and mobile phone addiction under the background of public health emergency, which is one of the aims of the present study.

According to the dual systems model of self-control (Hofmann, Friese, & Strack, 2009 ), for individuals with high self-control, their behavior is more easily affected by the reflective system that helps them to present better delayed gratification when encountering negative life events; For individuals with low self-control, the impulse system starts to work and carries out intuitive heuristic processing to satisfy the current needs, which increases the incidence of 2021). Also, self-control is a protective factor against the effect of perceived stress on mobile phone addiction, thereby reducing their risk of mobile phone addiction in COVID affected group (Monroe & Simons, 1991) . Thus, between the COVID affected group and the unaffected group, some differences may also be observed in the moderating effect of self-control.

The present study aimed to examine the underlying mediation (rumination) and moderation (self-control) mechanisms between perceived stress and mobile phone addiction among college students under the context of COVID-19 epidemic. Specifically, this study constructed a moderated mediation model to answer four main hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1. Rumination mediates the association between perceived stress and mobile phone addiction.

Hypothesis 2. Self-control moderates the direct association. Perceived stress has a weaker association with mobile phone addiction among college students with a high level of self-control, in comparison to those with a low level of self-control.

Hypothesis 3. Self-control moderates the mediation processes. Perceived stress has weaker associations with rumination, which in turn have weaker associations with mobile phone addiction among college students with a high level of self-control, in comparison to those with a low level of self-control. 

Participants were recruited from one university in a large city in Central China. Convenience sampling was used to select classes in freshmen and sophomores. A total of 653 college students completed the survey. After getting rid of the invalid questionnaires (questionnaires with lots of blanks or repeated answers), data from 628 participants were retainedthe valid response rate was 96.17% and the missing data percentage was 3.83%.

All missing data were replaced by series means. In the sample, the mean age was 18.30 years (SD age = 0.86, range = 16-21). 326 were females (51.91%) and 302 were males (48.09%). There were 203 (32.32%) participants reporting that they were not affected by the epidemic of COVID-19, 312 (49.68%) were mildly affected, and 113 (18.0%) were moderately and severely affected. There were 130 college students reporting that they used J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f mobile phones for less than 3 hours per day during the non-epidemic period, 266 for 3-5 hours and 232 for more than 5 hours; 37 people used mobile phones for less than 3 hours per day during the epidemic period , 131 for 3-5 hours, and 460 for more than 5 hours.

The dimension of stress from the Chinese version (Gong, Xie, Xu, & Luo, 2010) of the Depression-Anxiety-Stress Scale (Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995) was used to assess the symptoms of stress individuals experience. The dimension of stress consists of 7 items rated on a four-point scale (1 = disagree to 4 = totally agree), with higher scores indicating a higher level of perceived stress. In this study, Cronbach's α for this scale was 0.87.

The Chinese version (Xiang, Wang, & Ma, 2019) of the Short Version of the Smartphone Addiction Scale (SAS-SV) was used (Kwon et al., 2013) . The scale consists of 10 items rated on a six-point scale (1 = totally disagree, 6 = totally agree), with higher scores indicating a higher level of mobile phone addiction. Previous research demonstrated that scoring 32 of 60 was selected as cut-off to classify mobile phone addicts (Lopez-Fernandez, 2017).

Cronbach's α in this study was 0.89. Hayes (2013) . Because previous research indicates that gender and age may affect mobile phone addiction (Lian, Liu, Sun, & Zhou, 2018) , these were included as covariates in the present study.

Common variance analysis was applied to the four questionnaires through Harman's one-factor method. Principal component analysis on all variables extracted 8 eigenvalues greater than 1. The first factor explained 30.44% of the variance, which was less than the critical value of 40%, demonstrating that the common method bias was not a problem in the current study (Podsakoff et al. 2003) .

The results of the descriptive statistics and correlation analysis are presented in Table 1 .

Correlation analyses revealed that perceived stress was significantly and positively correlated with mobile phone addiction and rumination, and was significantly and negatively correlated with self-control. Mobile phone addiction was significantly and negatively correlated with self-control, and positively correlated with rumination. Self-control was significantly and negatively correlated with rumination. 

Model 4 from the SPSS macro PROCESS was used to test for the existence of mediation.

After controlling for gender and age, perceived stress was positively associated with mobile phone addiction in the absence of the mediator (β = 0.30, p < 0.001). As can be seen from Table 2 , when rumination was included, perceived stress was positively associated with rumination (β = 0.55, p < 0.001), which in turn positively associated with mobile phone addiction (β = 0.34, p < 0.001). The association between perceived stress and mobile phone addiction was nonsignificant (β = 0.11, p = 0.05). Furthermore, the results of bootstrapping, which is presented in Table 3 , showed that the 95% confidence interval for the indirect effect of rumination ranged from 0.12 to 0.28 (not including zero), and the direct effect of perceived stress on mobile phone addiction ranged from 0.00 to 0.21 (including zero). The mediation effect accounted for 63.33% of the total effects. These findings indicated that rumination fully mediated the relation between perceived stress and mobile phone addiction. 

Model 59 from the SPSS macro PROCESS was applied to test for the proposed moderated mediation model with rumination as mediator and self-control as moderator. As displayed in Table 4 , the interaction of perceived stress and self-control did not show significant effects on mobile phone addiction (β = 0.06, p > 0.05), not supporting Hypothesis 2. However, the interaction of perceived stress and self-control showed significant effects on rumination (β = J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f Journal Pre-proof 0.10, p < 0.001), and the interaction of rumination and self-control showed significant effects on mobile phone addiction (β = -0.12, p < 0.01). These findings indicated that self-control moderated the association between perceived stress and rumination and between rumination and mobile phone addiction. The moderation mediation pathways with path weights included is outlined in Figure 2 .

To further figure out the essence of the interaction effect, analysis of simple slope was conducted. Figure 3 and Figure 4 show the association between perceived stress and rumination and between rumination and mobile phone addiction at two levels of self-control (low level, 1 SD below the mean; high level, 1 SD above the mean). As can be seen from 

Because the subjects were divided into two groups (the COVID affected group and the COVID unaffected group), we conducted the multigroup analysis to figure out the differences between these two groups. As can be seen from Table 5 Note. Group 1 = COVID affected group, Group 2 = COVID unaffected group *p < 0.05. **p < 0.01. ***p < 0.001 J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f 

Based on the general strain theory (Agnew, 1992) , the cognitive-behavioral model of PIU (Davis, 2001) , the present study constructed a moderated mediating model to test how and when perceived stress is linked with mobile phone addiction during the COVID-19 epidemic.

As expected, the findings of the present study indicated that rumination mediated the association between perceived stress and mobile phone addiction. Self-control moderated the association between perceived stress and rumination and between rumination and mobile phone addiction. Importantly, in the affected group, self-control work as moderator at all pathways in the mediational model.

Our research revealed that rumination fully mediated the relation between perceived stress and mobile phone addiction, which verifies hypothesis 1 and suggests that the effect of perceived stress on mobile phone addiction is mainly through rumination. In line with the cognitive-behavioral model of PIU (Davis, 2001) , this study found that stressful life event can be considered as a distal cause and rumination as a proximal cause of mobile phone addiction, and the distal factor (i.e., perceived stress) affects mobile phone addiction through proximal factors (i.e., rumination). The results above is similar to previous research that showed that the distal factor (i.e., social anxiety) affects mobile phone addiction through proximal factors (i.e., rumination) (Kong et al., 2020) . Our results further expand the theory on the basis of previous studies.

Moreover, self-control played a moderating role in the mediation process, supporting Hypothesis 3. For the first stage of the mediation process, with the increase of self-control, the conditional association between perceived stress and rumination became weaker. This was in agreement with previous study that uncovered individuals with low self-control tend to ruminate more frequently when under pressure, in that they are unable to focus attention on one thing and inhibit irrelevant ideas (Sofia & Cruz, 2015) . The result also coincides with the dual systems model of self-control (Hofmann et al., 2009) . For the second stage of the mediation process, one intriguing finding was that with higher levels of self-control, the conditional relation between rumination and mobile phone addiction became stronger rather than weaker. It seems that high self-control exacerbates the effect of rumination on mobile phone addiction. However, as shown in Figure 2 , it is still very clear that when self-control is J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f at a low level, the score of mobile phone addiction is far higher than that when self-control is at a high level. That is to say, self-control not only does not aggravate the effect of rumination on mobile phone addiction, but also mitigate the effect . The reason for this result may be that regardless of the level of rumination, individuals with low self-control have a very high level of mobile phone addiction, so that although the level of mobile phone addiction is high, the predictive effect of rumination on it is difficult to exhibit. Also, relevant studies have documented that individuals with low self-control are unable to lower the increasing craving and are more likely to engage in mobile phone addiction (Gökçearslan, Mumcu, Haşlaman, & Çevik, 2016; Liu, Zhang, Yang, Zhang, Fan, & Zhou, 2018) .

In addition, this study found that the direct relation between perceived stress and mobile phone addiction was not moderated by self-control, which violates hypothesis 2. One possible reason may be that the direct relation between perceived stress and mobile phone addiction was not significant, thus the moderator of self-control mainly moderates the mediation effect, rather than direct effect. Another reason may be that the level of self-control is significantly higher than that of the unaffected group (t=2.70, p＜0.01), but the total samples included the affected group and the unaffected group, which may cause moderation effect to be diluted by the unaffected group. This enlightens us to conduct and teachers) can be adopted in future research to provide more solid evidence. Last but not least, because our participants were from one university selected from just one city, generalization of these findings to other populations should be made with caution.

Future research may explore the proposed model among diverse populations. In spite of the limitations, the present study has both theoretical and practical implications. Firstly, to our knowledge, this research is among the first research to shed light on the relation between perceived stress and mobile phone addiction under the context of public health emergency.

Also, this study provides important reference for the prevention and intervention of mobile phone addiction among college students in response to major public health events.

During the pandemic of COVID-19, perceived stress positively predicted college students' mobile phone addiction. Rumination mediated the relationship between perceived stress and mobile phone addiction. Moreover, self-control moderated the effect of perceived stress on rumination and the effect of rumination on mobile phone addiction. Also, between the COVID affected group and the unaffected group, some differences also be observed in the moderating effect of self-control.

Ego depletion: is the active self a limited resource

The strength model of self-control. Current directions in psychological science

Can disordered mobile phone use be considered a behavioral addiction? an update on current evidence and a comprehensive model for future research

Rumination and self-control interact to predict bulimic symptomatology in college students

Study on relationship among university students' life stress, smart mobile phone addiction, and life satisfaction

The relationship between life stress and smartphone addiction on Taiwanese university student: A mediation model of learning self-efficacy and social self-efficacy

A cognitive-behavioral model of pathological Internet use

Introduction to mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis: A regression-based approach

The protective role of coping and social resources for depressive symptoms among young adolescents

Impulse and self-control from a dual-systems perspective

The influence of parental support among incarcerated adolescent offenders: The moderating effects of self-control

Alleviating depression only to become problematic mobile phone users: Can face-to-face communication be the antidote?

The effect of social anxiety on mobile phone dependence among Chinese adolescents: A moderated mediation model

Development and validation of a smartphone addiction scale (SAS)

Loneliness and adolescent mobile phone addiction during the covid-19 pandemic: the role of escape motivation and self-control

Mobile phone addiction and college students' procrastination:analysis of a moderated mediation model

Perceived stress and mobile phone addiction in Chinese adolescents: a moderated mediation model

Perceived stress of the COVID-19 pandemic and adolescents' depression symptoms: The moderating role of character strengths

Short version of the Smartphone Addiction Scale adapted to Spanish and French: Towards a cross-cultural research in problematic mobile phone use

The structure of negative emotional states: Comparison of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS) with the Beck Depression and Anxiety Inventories

Mental symptoms in different health professionals during the SARS attack: A follow-up study

The Effect of Violent Exposure on Online Aggressive Behavior of College Students: A Moderated Mediation Model

The survey of Mobile phone usage among Chinese college students

A prospective study of depression and posttraumatic stress symptoms after a natural disaster: the 1989 loma prieta earthquake

Rethinking rumination

Common method biases in behavioral research: a critical review of the literature and recommended remedies

Assessing treatments used to reduce rumination and/or worry: A systematic review

Neural regions associated with self control and mentalizing are recruited during prosocial behaviors towards the family

Rumination reconsidered: A psychometric analysis

Constructing Narratives of Resilience with High-risk Youth

Immediate psychological responses and associated factors during the initial stage of the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) epidemic among the general population in China

Good self-control moderates the effect of mass media on adolescent tobacco and alcohol use: tests with studies of children and adolescents

Reliability and Validity of Chinese Version of the Smartphone Addiction Scale in Adolescents