Leisure experience and mobile phone addiction: Evidence from Chinese adolescents

Abstract

Background: During the Covid-19 pandemic, online learning became the mainstream because of many restrictions on interpersonal relationships. Children spent more and more time using mobile phones, which also aroused public concern.In past research on the prevention of problematic mobile phone use, it was easy to neglect meaningful part of leisure. Hence, based on Davis's cognitive-behavioral model, this study was designed to verify how leisure experience influences mobile phone addiction through maladaptive cognition, which received little attention before. Methods: By convenient sampling method, it involved a sample of 1007 middle school students recruited from Northern China. We used adolescent leisure experience questionnaire, maladaptive cognition scale and mobile phone addiction scale to measure adolescents' leisure experience, maladaptive cognition and mobile phone addiction respectively. Results: The findings revealed that leisure experience was negatively correlated with maladaptive cognition (r = −0.21, p < 0.01) and mobile phone addiction (r = −0.20, p < 0.01) respectively. Maladaptive cognition was positively correlated with mobile phone addiction (r = 0.51, p < 0.01). Given gender, age and family economic conditions, the negative predictive effect of leisure experience on mobile phone addiction was significant (β = −0.18，p < 0.001). Besides, the process by which leisure experience predicted mobile phone addiction through maladaptive cognition was significant, indirect effect = −0.10, SE = 0.02, 95 % CI = [−0.13, −0.07]. Conclusions: Adolescents’ great leisure experience has a positive impact on mobile phone addiction, which can be achieved by reducing maladaptive cognition. Therefore，it is significant to improve their leisure experience and guide them to perceive their irrational beliefs in leisure and rethink offline leisure and real life from more positive views.