Original Research
Proneness to Smartphone Addiction in Relation to Morningness and Eveningness Abel Thomas, Samantha Hodges
Abstract With an influx of cellular phone use, questions have arisen over its impact on smartphone users. The purpose of the current study is to find out how many students have phone addictions, how severe these addictions are, and how the most severe cases relate to morningness and eveningness. One area in which phone addiction may negatively impact an individual’s quality of life is the amount of sleep he or she loses due to smartphone usage. Previous researchers investigated how smartphone addiction was linked to whether a person was a morning or evening person and found that evening oriented individuals were more likely to have a “severe” addiction than morning oriented individuals. In this previous study, a sample group of German students was given two questionnaires, one to determine whether a person was a morning or evening person based on their answers to the Composite Scale of Morningness (CSM) and another to assess phone addiction based on the Smartphone Addiction Proneness Scale (SAPS). This current study, which followed similar procedures with an American sample, found that there was no significant correlation between being evening oriented or morning oriented and smartphone addiction proneness. With the rise of technology and people’s everyday use of the Internet, the results from this study are important to help understand the consequences that an overuse of these electronic devices may entail.
Introduction Currently, over 150 million individuals worldwide use the Internet, with 70 to 80% of adults in the United States having online access (Woods & Scott, 2016). With this rapid growth of the availability of the Internet, the rise of smartphones was inevitable. The term “smartphone” was coined in 1997 when it became a part of people’s vernacular (Randler et al., 2016). With this influx of cellular phone use, questions have arisen over the impact that cell phones have on smartphone users. These include questions on how much of a hold cell phones have on people, why cellular devices have become so popular, and how much do people prioritize their devices over other forms of technology. Excessive use of mobile phones can affect mental and physical health status. In recent studies, correlations have been found between mobile phone dependency and loss of sleep (Toda & Ezoe, 2013; Toda et al., 2006). This study observes how this mobile phone dependency can be related to whether someone is an evening person or a morning person. One area of discussion on the topic is determining the level of phone addiction people have and the primary cause of this addiction. “Addiction” is defined in Webster’s Dictionary: a pathologic condition that one cannot tolerate without the continuous administration of a substance. Commonly handled by neuropsychiatric departments, addiction is a phenomenon that manifests tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, and dependence, and it is often accompanied by social problems. The term was once limited to drugs or other physical substances, but it is now also applied to the Internet, gaming, mobile-phone
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usage, and other behaviors (Lee et al., 2016). The components of smartphone addiction are tolerance, withdrawal, compulsive symptoms, and functional impairment (Lin et al., 2014). Smartphone addiction might be a type of non-substance addiction (Serenko & Turel, 2010). However, the term “addiction” may not be appropriate because studies showing behavioral and neurobiological similarities between mobile phone addiction and other types of addictive behaviors are lacking (Billieux et al., 2015). Therefore, these authors suggested the term “problematic usage” and labeled this behavior as “addiction proneness” (Kim et al., 2014). With the rise of smartphones, more teenagers are growing up with technology and its negative effects like phone addiction proneness (Lepp et al., 2014). The primary purpose of the current study is to find out if a sample of high school students have phone addictions, how severe they might be, and how the most severe cases could relate to morningness and eveningness. Morningness is defined as the characteristic of being most active and alert during the morning, and eveningness is the characteristic of being most active and alert during the evening (Randler et al., 2016). In order to conclude that a person may have addiction proneness, researchers must observe the implications of the addiction on the subject. For this study, it would be observing the correlation between sleep loss and the effect cellular phones have on the people using them. This is prudent as sleep is how people reenergize themselves, and, when reduced, has a slew of negative effects that have been well documented within the literature: increased Internet use is
