Psychology Research and Behavior Management (Nov 2023)
Why is Smartphone Addiction More Common in Adolescents with Harsh Parenting? Depression and Experiential Avoidance‘s Multiple Mediating Roles
Abstract
Wanqing Lin,1,* Hanyu Liang,2,* Huaibin Jiang,3,* Mohd Azrin Mohd Nasir,1,* Huiling Zhou2 1School of Applied Psychology, Social Work & Policy, UUM College of Arts & Sciences, University Utara Malaysia, Sintok, Malaysia; 2School of Medical Humanities, Guizhou Medical University, Guiyang, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Psychology, Fujian Polytechnic Normal University, Fuqing, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Huaibin Jiang; Mohd Azrin Mohd Nasir, Email [email protected]; [email protected]: Harsh parenting is positively correlated with adolescents’ smartphone addiction, according to a growing corpus of studies. The various mediating processes that could underlie this link, however, are not well understood. Based upon the experiential avoidance model, the current research aimed to identify the relation between harsh parenting and adolescents’ smartphone addiction and the mediating roles of adolescents’ depression and experiential avoidance.Methods: We recruited 456 adolescents (female = 52.6%; Mage = 13.19 years, SD = 0.85) at a public junior high school in China to complete the harsh discipline scale, 90-item Hopkins symptom checklist, acceptance and action questionnaire version II, and smartphone addiction scale short version. SPSS24.0 was used to conduct independent samples t-test, descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation analysis and common method bias test, PROCESS were used to conduct a significance test of the chain mediation effect on the data. Age, gender, and grade were used as con-founders that were controlled in order to make cautious predictions.Results: The results showed that (1) harsh parenting was positively correlated with adolescents’ depression, experiential avoidance, and smartphone addiction; (2) both depression and experiential avoidance fully mediated the link between harsh parenting and smartphone addiction; and (3) depression and experiential avoidance also sequentially mediated the link between harsh parenting and smartphone addiction. These findings have significant implications for the prevention and intervention of adolescents’ smartphone addiction.Conclusion: These findings suggested that harsh parenting may have an indirect impact on smartphone addiction in both a simple way (parallel mediation) and a complicated way (serial mediation). In addition, these studies shed light on smartphone addiction prevention and intervention.Keywords: harsh parenting, depression, experiential avoidance, smartphone addiction, adolescents
