ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Addictive Disorders
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1621900
This article is part of the Research TopicExecutive Functions, Reward Systems and Addiction in Adolescents and Young AdultsView all 6 articles
Social Anxiety and Smartphone Addiction among College Students: The Mediating Role of Loneliness
Provisionally accepted
Xingping Zhou
Baoan Feng*- Quzhou University, Quzhou, China
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As one of the by-products of smartphone proliferation, smartphone addiction, has negatively affected college students' academics and well-being, making it a critical issue for educators to address. This study explored how social anxiety and loneliness predict smartphone addiction, adding to prior research in this area.Design, Setting and Participants: A cross-sectional research design and a random sampling method were employed to collect data from 2,113 Chinese college students in February 2025. The average age of participants was 19.9 ± 1.23 years (age range: 18-25 years).Measurements: All participants provided their data on demographic characteristics, social anxiety (assessed using the Revised Social Anxiety Subscale of the Self-Consciousness Scale), smartphone addiction (measured via the Cell Phone Addiction Scale), and loneliness (evaluated with the 6-item De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale). Mediation analyses were conducted using Hayes' PROCESS macro (v4.1) in SPSS (v24). Specifically, Model 4 implemented 5,000 bootstrap resampling repetitions to calculate indirect effects, deriving 95% bias-corrected confidence intervals through percentile-based resampling.Findings: Statistical analyses showed that social anxiety was positively correlated with loneliness (r = 0.269, p < 0.001), smartphone addiction (r = 0.158, p < 0.001), and gender (r = 0.058, p < 0.01), and loneliness was positively correlated with smartphone addiction (r = 0.246, p < 0.001) and age (r = 0.046, p < 0.05). Social anxiety predicted smartphone addiction (β = 0.309, p < 0.001, 95%CI = [0.222, 0.396]), and loneliness predicted smartphone addiction (β = 0.406, p < 0.001, 95%CI = [0.222, 0.396]), with loneliness partially mediating their relationship (effect = 0.123, 95%CI = [0.092, 0.157]).Conclusions: Social anxiety is significantly correlated with smartphone addiction, and loneliness partially mediating their relationship. Reducing loneliness can prevent smartphone addiction among college students with social anxiety.
Keywords: Smartphone addiction, social anxiety, Loneliness, cross-sectional design, college students
Received: 02 May 2025; Accepted: 08 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhou and Feng. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Baoan Feng, Quzhou University, Quzhou, China
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