Youths’ Habitual Use of Smartphones Alters Sleep Quality and Memory: Insights from a National Sample of Chinese Students

Abstract

A growing body of work has been devoted to studying the smartphone addiction in youths and its impact on their lives, but less is known about the predictors and effects of youth habitual use of smartphones. Guided by social cognitive theory, this study investigates how habitual smartphone use affects sleep quality and everyday memory based on a nationally representative sample of Chinese students (N = 2298). It uses a cluster-randomized sampling with stratification of different areas, consisting of both urban and rural students aged 6–18 years from elementary, middle, and high schools across China. It found that Chinese students exhibited a habitual smartphone use, who were generally confident in using mobile devices, but few had smartphone addiction. Significant gender and age differences were identified concerning the habitual use of smartphone. Specifically, boys demonstrated higher levels of habitual use and smartphone self-efficacy than the girls. High school students showed the highest level of habitual smartphone use compared to those in elementary and middle schools. Smartphone use duration, frequency, and self-efficacy predicted the habitual use, which also led to poorer sleep quality and worse memory outcomes. Prebedtime exposure moderated the relationship between habitual smartphone uses and sleep quality. The results show that students’ habitual smartphone use had a significant impact on their health, cognition and more, even when they exhibited little smartphone addiction. The findings contribute to a better understanding of smartphone impact on school-age youths.

Relationship between Age, Gender, Mobile Phone Usage and some Cognitive Functions among the Nigerian Students

“…However, 64.96% agreed that they had no benefit from phone usage and most of the participants are often stressed after phone usage (81.69%). Our results shows significant distributional differences in males (38.5%) and females (29.4%) for benefits (P=0.022) from phone usage, which agrees with [10] whose study found out that boys demonstrated higher levels of habitual use and self-efficacy of smart phones than girls. The study also showed that, smart phone users showed less working memory than non-smart phone users: The result agrees with [11] who posited that frequent media taskers differed from light/nonusers with respect to their working memory capacity, and also exhibited diminished long-term memory.…”

Smartphone Abuse Amongst Adolescents: The Role of Impulsivity and Sensation Seeking

“…As to gender, this is a controverted matter, as some authors consider being a female as a risk factor toward improper usage of smartphones ( Rial et al, 2015 ; Álvarez and Moral, 2020 ; Li et al, 2021 ), with a greater dependence on them amongst females ( Sánchez-Martínez and Otero, 2009 ; Álvarez and Moral, 2020 ; Ballestar-Tarín et al, 2020 ), while others do not find such a relation ( Son et al, 2021 ). Our study shows a clearly direct relationship, as it is the first factor which emerges upon analysis of smartphone addiction and which itself explains 7.3% of improper mobile usage.…”

“…Other research lines suggest that there are gender differences in smartphone abuse behavior and that women are more at risk of misusing this technological support ( Rial et al, 2015 ; Álvarez and Moral, 2020 ; Li et al, 2021 ), although further research in this direction is still needed.…”

The association between mobile devices use and behavior problems among fourth grade children in Japan

“…4 A study of children aged 6-18 years old in China reported that habitual smartphone use was positively associated with poor sleep quality and everyday memory. 5 Further, some crosssectional population-based studies reported the positive association between duration of mobile devices usage and depression, although the effect size was small. 6,7 On the other hand, the benefits of moderate duration of digital devices usage were reported.…”