Recorded Behavior as a Valuable Resource for Diagnostics in Mobile Phone Addiction: Evidence from Psychoinformatics

Behavioral Sciences

Konrad Błaszkiewicz¹  Boris Trendafilov¹  Ionut Andone¹  Alexander Markowetz¹  Rayna Sariyska²  Bernd Lachmann²  Christian Montag² 

[1] Department of Informatics, University of Bonn, Bonn, 53117, Germany;Institute of Psychology and Education, Ulm University, Ulm, 89081, Germany;

关键词: computer science;    psychology;    diagnostics;    behavioral addiction;    psychoinformatics;   

DOI  :  10.3390/bs5040434

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Psychologists and psychiatrists commonly rely on self-reports or interviews to diagnose or treat behavioral addictions. The present study introduces a novel source of data: recordings of the actual problem behavior under investigation. A total of N = 58 participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire measuring problematic mobile phone behavior featuring several questions on weekly phone usage. After filling in the questionnaire, all participants received an application to be installed on their smartphones, which recorded their phone usage for five weeks. The analyses revealed that weekly phone usage in hours was overestimated; in contrast, numbers of call and text message related variables were underestimated. Importantly, several associations between actual usage and being addicted to mobile phones could be derived exclusively from the recorded behavior, but not from self-report variables. The study demonstrates the potential benefit to include methods of psychoinformatics in the diagnosis and treatment of problematic mobile phone use.

【 授权许可】

Unknown