The Effects of Cell Phone Use and Emotion‐regulation Style on College Students' Learning

Abstract

Cell phones are becoming an inevitable part of the classroom, but extant research suggests that using cell phones in the classroom impairs academic performance. The present study examined the impact of different cell phone policies on learning and emotion-regulation style. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions: cell phone usage allowed, cell phone possession allowed but without usage, cell phones removed, and a no-instruction control group. All participants watched a 20-minute lecture and were sent text messages to mimic classroom distractions. Afterward, participants took a multiple-choice test and filled out questionnaires assessing their level of obsessiveness, nomophobia, and mindfulness. Participants who had their cell phone taken away performed best on the test with no other differences. None of the emotionalregulation measures moderated the results. These findings provide important insight as to how cell phone policies can optimize learning in the classroom.

Nomophobia: An Individual’s Growing Fear of Being without a Smartphone—A Systematic Literature Review

“…The research analyzed is eminently exploratory, descriptive, nonexperimental, correlational, and cross-sectional, using the questionnaire as a single research collection instrument [1,2,4,13,16,[18][19][20]23,25,26,[29][30][31][32][33]35,37,39,58,[61][62][63][64], presenting a quantitative methodological design. Others, however, extend this information with mixed methodological design, including qualitative techniques, such as interviews or discussion groups [5,20,24,65].…”

“…Others, however, extend this information with mixed methodological design, including qualitative techniques, such as interviews or discussion groups [5,20,24,65]. To a lesser extent, some research applies an experimental design, either through the application of cognitive behavioral therapies [5,20] or the use of control and experimental groups [11,13,15,59,62]. Finally, the articles aimed at validating an instrument for measuring nomophobia stand out.…”

“…Most research aims to analyze the prevalence of nomophobia in different groups, whether students, clinic patients, or random people [1,18,19,23,29,30,32,33,36,37]. At the same time, some of them ask if there is any correlation between presenting nomophobia and other alterations of a psychic [5,13,25,26,35,[58][59][60] or physical [61] nature, as well as alterations in learning and attention [31,54], in academic performance [2], coping styles [4], or other psychosocial problems arising in the digital and smartphone era [11,15]. Similarly, there are studies that focus on determining risk factors in relation to certain personality traits [16].…”

“…However, other researchers have been interested in examining the relationship between nomophobia and physical factors, such as age [29,33,60], context [29], presence of Carpal tunnel syndrome or median nerve in the wrist [61], and gender [32,33,35,39,58]. Others have studied the relationship between nomophobia and psychic and psychological variables such as anxiety [20,33,37,39], panic disorder [5,20,59], stress [11], depression, avoidance or hostility [12,39], obsessiveness [12,25], FOMO (fear of missing out) [15], personality (extraversion, awareness, emotional stability and regulation, sympathy, and openness to experience) [12,13,16,26,33,35], mindfulness [58], and loneliness and self-happiness [26]. Moreover, others have studied the relationship between nomophobia and sociological, educational, and other factors, including Internet usage and social media [29,37], academic performance [2], learning and attention [13,62], socio-educational variables and collectivism [63], and social threat [11].…”

“…Smartphone addiction is so prevalent that it is already considered to be like any other addiction to harmful substances. Therefore, it is a public health problem [9], which is why, because of the excessive use of this device [10] and the dependence that this technology generates [11], a new pathology known as nomophobia is emerging [12] and being cataloged as a clinical disorder [13].…”