The Relationship Between Perceived Stress And Mobile Phone Addiction Tendency Of College Students:A Moderated Mediation Model

In an increasingly competitive society,college students have to face more and more pressure.Individuals need to consume certain self-control resources to adjust their perceptions,emotions and behaviors in order to cope with stress.However,the continuous loss of resources will lead to self-regulation fatigue.In this case,college students may choose instant gratification(such as being addicted to smart phones)to relieve their pressure due to the lack of self-control resources.In order to understand the mechanism behind this phenomenon,by adopting a cross-sectional design,with 1253 college students as subjects,this study combined variable-centred and individual-centred methods to analyze the relationship between perceived stress,regulatory emotional selfefficacy,self-regulatory fatigue and mobile phone addiction tendency.The results show that:(1)The overall stress perception and mobile phone addiction tendency of college students are at medium and low level,while the degree of self-regulation fatigue is low,and the overall regulatory emotional self-efficacy is high.The scores of perceived stress,self-regulatory fatigue,regulatory emotional self-efficacy,mobile phone addiction tendency and their different dimensions have significant differences in gender,grade and average daily/bedtime mobile phone usage duration.(2)There is a significant positive correlation between perceived stress and selfregulating fatigue,mobile phone addiction tendency,and a significant negative correlation between perceived stress and regulatory emotional self-efficacy.While there exists a significant negative correlation between self-regulatory fatigue and regulatory emotional self-efficacy,and a significant positive correlation between self-regulatory fatigue and mobile phone addiction tendency.Besides,there is also a significant negative correlation between regulatory emotional self-efficacy and mobile phone addiction tendency.(3)Self-regulatory fatigue plays a mediating role in the relationship between perceived stress and mobile phone addiction tendency;in addition,regulatory emotional self-efficacy has a regulating effect on the relationship between perceived stress and selfregulation fatigue.Moreover,compared with college students with high emotional regulation self-efficacy,the perceived stress of college students with low emotional regulation self-efficacy has a stronger positive predictive effect on self-regulation fatigue.(4)Participants can be divided into two potential categories according to the degree of mobile phone addiction tendency by using latent profile analysis: high addiction tendency group and low addiction tendency group.The scores of perceived stress,regulatory emotional self-efficacy,self-regulatory fatigue and their different dimensions are significantly different with mobile phone addiction tendency in different potential categories.This study supports that perceived stress can significantly positively predict the mobile phone addiction tendency of college students through the mediating effect of selfregulatory fatigue,and regulatory emotional self-efficacy regulates the first half of the mediation model.The results suggest that educators can provide different intervention or guidance for the college students who stuck in mobile phone addiction tendency from the perspective of perceived stress,self-regulatory fatigue or regulatory emotional selfefficacy.