Problematic smartphone use, nature connectedness, and anxiety

Richardson, M, Hussain, Z ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7678-6615 and Griffiths, MD ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8880-6524, 2018. Problematic smartphone use, nature connectedness, and anxiety. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 7 (1), pp. 109-116. ISSN 2062-5871

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Abstract

Background: Smartphone use has increased greatly at a time when concerns about society’s disconnection from nature have also markedly increased. Recent research has also indicated that smartphone use can be problematic for a small minority of individuals.

Methods: In this study, associations between problematic smartphone use (PSU), nature connectedness, and anxiety were investigated using a cross-sectional design (n = 244).

Results: Associations between PSU and both nature connectedness and anxiety were confirmed. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were used to identify threshold values on the Problematic Smartphone Use Scale (PSUS) at which strong associations with anxiety and nature connectedness occur. The area under the curve was calculated and positive likelihood ratios used as a diagnostic parameter to identify optimal cut-off for PSU. These provided good diagnostic ability for nature connectedness, but poor and non-significant results for anxiety. ROC analysis showed the optimal PSUS threshold for high nature connectedness to be 15.5 (sensitivity: 58.3%; specificity: 78.6%) in response to an LR+ of 2.88.

Conclusions: The results demonstrate the potential utility for the PSUS as a diagnostic tool, with a level of smartphone use that users may perceive as non-problematic being a significant cut-off in terms of achieving beneficial levels of nature connectedness. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Journal of Behavioral Addictions
Creators:	Richardson, M., Hussain, Z. and Griffiths, M.D.
Publisher:	Akadémiai Kiadó
Date:	2018
Volume:	7
Number:	1
ISSN:	2062-5871
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1556/2006.7.2018.10 DOI
Rights:	© 2018 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium for non-commercial purposes, provided the original author and source are credited.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Jill Tomkinson
Date Added:	13 Feb 2018 13:43
Last Modified:	23 Sep 2019 10:02
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/32682

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