Smartphone use and social media addiction in undergraduate students
Children’s use of social media has increased significantly over the past decade. As a result, they are susceptible to smartphone addiction. In particular, parents’ and children’s well-being and behaviors are negatively affected by smartphone addiction. Such addiction likely affects both physical performance and lifestyle. Adolescents utilize their smartphones while performing other tasks. The secondary task might divert attention away from the primary task. Reaction time is the combination of brain processing and muscular movement. Texting or communicating on a smartphone while performing another task may affect reaction time. Thus, the purpose of this study was to explore the influence of smartphone use on reaction time in undergraduate students who were addicted to smartphones.
Methods: The Smartphone Addiction Scale-Short Version (SAS-SV) was used to assign 64 undergraduate students to the smartphone addiction group (n = 32) and the control group (n = 32). The reaction time (RT) of an organism is used to determine how rapidly it responds to stimuli. All participants were examined on the RT test under three conditions: no smartphone use (control), texting, and chatting on a smartphone. Participants were questioned by smartphone through text message or chat with the support of a researcher during the texting and conversation conditions. While responding to the questions, the participant was administered an RT test.
Results: The results showed that smartphone addiction tends to have a reduced influence on reaction time when compared to the control group. Also, texting or conversing on a smartphone while doing other work had a substantial impact on reaction time in the undergraduates.
Conclusions: Combining smartphone use with other activities tends to reduce undergraduate students’ reaction time.
Corresponding authors: Nichapa Parasin, Teerachai Amnuaylojaroen
Competing interests: No competing interests were disclosed.
Grant information: This research was supported by the Thailand Science Research and Innovation fund and the University of Phayao (Grant No. FF66-UoE010).
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Copyright: © 2022 Parasin N et al. 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, provided the original work is properly cited.
How to cite: Parasin N, Watthanasuwakul M, Udomkichpagon P and Amnuaylojaroen T. Smartphone use and social media addiction in undergraduate students [version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review]. F1000Research 2022, 11:1524 (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.128545.1)