COVID-19 anxiety symptoms associated with problematic smartphone use severity in Chinese adults
By Jon D. Elhai, Haibo Yang, Dean McKay, G. Asmundson. Journal of Affective Disorders, 2020
284 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Background COVID-19 is fast-spreading and potentially fatal, introducing home quarantine, social distancing, and increased internet usage globally. We investigated COVID-19 anxiety, general anxiety and depression symptoms, and their impact on problematic smartphone use (PSU) severity Methods Participants were 908 residents of a large Eastern Chinese city, surveyed from late-February to mid-March, 2020. We administered online measures including the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-21, Smartphone Addiction Scale-Short Version, and items querying COVID-19-related news exposure and threat of death. Additionally, participants rated anxiety using the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale-7 with reference to COVID-19. Results COVID-19 anxiety correlated with severity of PSU, depression and anxiety. Using established cut-off scores, 12% of participants were identified with at least moderate depression, and 24% with moderate anxiety. Using structural equation modeling, COVID-19 anxiety related to PSU severity, mediating relations between general anxiety and PSU severity. However, controlling PSU for general anxiety and depression severity, COVID-19 anxiety no longer predicted PSU severity. Limitations Limitations include the cross-sectional research design and reliance on data from only one country. Conclusions Results are discussed in context of the I-PACE model of excessive internet use. While COVID-19 anxiety is likely a global anxiety-provoking event, other everyday worries and anxiety are additionally clinically important in driving excessive internet use.
Subfields: Applied Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/741aba41439ade870a7d2369fa5c7b05812ae736
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Citations in the corpus
- Psychological impacts from COVID-19 among university students: Risk factors across seven states in the United States (2021, background): “Younger people also engage in social media more than older people during the pandemic [12, 82].”