If You Are Always On Your Smartphone, You Are More Likely To Experience Depression

It's been suggested before that people, especially younger people, may be at an increased risk of depression and loneliness when they're addicted to their smartphones.

But it's always been unclear whether the addiction causes the depression or vice versa.

Now, researchers from the University of Arizona have conducted research to get to the bottom of this chicken and egg question. They looked at a group of 346 older adolescents, between the ages of 18-20. And researcher Matthew Lapierre, alongside his collaborators seem to have found that smartphone dependency predicts higher reports of depressive symptoms and loneliness, rather than the other way around.

"The main takeaway is that smartphone dependency directly predicts later depressive symptoms," said Lapierre, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. "There's an issue where people are entirely too reliant on the device, in terms of feeling anxious if they don't have it accessible, and they're using it to the detriment of their day-to-day life."

To be clear, in the study Lapierre and his co-authors focus on specifically a person's psychological reliance on and need for a smartphone, as opposed to general smartphone use. "The research grows out of my concern that there is too much of a focus on general use of smartphones," Lapierre said. "Smartphones can be useful. They help us connect with others. We've really been trying to focus on this idea of dependency and problematic use of smartphones being the driver for these psychological outcomes. "

According to master's student Pengfei Zhao, who, co-authored the study with Lapierre, understanding the details of the relationship between smartphone dependency and its psychological effects can help us figure out how to deal with it. "If depression and loneliness lead to smartphone dependency, we could reduce dependency by adjusting people's mental health," Zhao said. "But if smartphone dependency precedes depression and loneliness, which is what we found, we can reduce smartphone dependency to maintain or improve wellbeing."

Older adolescents were specifically used for the study because the researchers were taking into account two important things. Firstly is that this age group grew up with smartphones, and secondly they're at a transitional stage in their life already filled with turmoil, making them vulnerable to mental health conditions, like depression.

"It might be easier for late adolescents to become dependent on smartphones, and smartphones may have a bigger negative influence on them because they are already very vulnerable to depression or loneliness," Zhao said.

Of course, there are other reasons why a person might be depressed of course. It's just that this research seems to indicate that smartphone addiction exacerbates that at the very least. So the researchers say, if you find yourself feeling lonely or down, replacing your constant engagement with your smartphone with something else might help.