Editorial: Significant Influencing Factors and Effective Interventions of Mobile Phone Addiction

Abstract

Editorial on the Research Topic Significant Influencing Factors and Effective Interventions of Mobile Phone Addiction With the development of the mobile Internet, mobile phones have become one of the indispensable tools in people's daily life. Mobile phone addiction, also named mobile phone dependence (Liu et al., 2022) or problematic mobile phone use (Lopez-Fernandez, 2017), has become a worldwide public health problem. Although different researchers use different terms, they seem to all agree with the seriousness of overusing mobile phones. Many studies on mobile phone addiction refer to a large number of studies on mobile phone dependence or problematic mobile phone use (e.g., Liu et al., 2017; Sahu et al., 2019). Similarly, studies on mobile phone dependence or problematic mobile phone use also cite a great many research findings on mobile phone addiction (e.g., Billieux, 2012; Nikhita et al., 2015; Yang et al., 2020). Different terms of mobile phone overuse may reflect only the different personal preferences of researchers. We set up a Research Topic to promote the research on mobile phone addiction from two aspects: influencing factors and intervention strategies of mobile phone addiction. Our Research Topic plays an important role in understanding the influencing factors of mobile phone addiction. First, our Research Topic reveals the unique and combined effects of multiple influencing factors, especially individual traits and environmental factors. For instance, gender (Wang et al.), neuroticism (Montag et al.), impulsivity, sensation seeking (Garrot et al.), preference for solitude, and mindfulness (Chen et al.) were all critical predictors of adolescent mobile phone addiction. In addition, self-control buffered the effect of parenting monitoring on adolescent mobile phone addiction (Hu and Wang). Shyness exacerbated the effect of perceived stress on short-form video application addiction (Liu et al.). The individual factors that play a moderating role between environmental factors and mobile phone addiction are the key factors considered in future intervention research. Second, in addition to focusing on general mobile phone addiction, our Research Topic also discusses the specific types of mobile phone addiction, such as short-from video addiction (Liu et al.) and live streaming addiction (Zhang and Li). Focusing on specific types of mobile phone addiction can refine the current research findings of mobile phone addiction and make the research results more valid. Recently, a scale that can distinguish four different types of mobile phone addiction has been developed in Chinese adolescents and adults with good reliability and validity (Liu et al., 2022). Future researchers can test the reliability and validity of the scale among different populations in multiple countries or compare whether there are differences in the influencing factors and consequences of different types of mobile phone addiction. Third, our Research Topic presents studies using a variety of methods to