Relevance & Research Question
While FoMO (Fear of Missing Out) is already well known as an important factor that leads to extensive smartphone use (ESU) and lowers wellbeing (WB), research starts to look at the new phenomenon Nomophobia (the fear of being separated from one’s smartphone and not being connected and reachable, e.g. Yildirim & Correia, 2015). However, it still remains unclear, how Nomophobia lowers wellbeing – social as well as psychological wellbeing – over and above the already known factors FoMO and ESU.
Methods & Data
This study (ad-hoc-sample: N=132) combines all factors in one design and investigates to what extend Nomophobia (measured by: NMP-Q-D Coenen & Görlich, 2022) is an additional factor that causes negative effects on wellbeing (measured by: FAHW, Wydra, 2020) over and above FoMO (measured by FoMO, Spitzer, 2015) as well as ESU (measured by: SAS-SV, Randler et al., 2016). Several regression analyses calculated the effect sizes for the main effects as well as the interaction effects for the different factors – controlled for age and gender.
Results
Interestingly, different effects can be found regarding psychological wellbeing compared to social wellbeing. Whereas ESU (beta=-.31, p<.01) but not nomophobia lowered the psychological wellbeing quite a lot, instead Nomophobia (beta=-.18, p<.10) but not ESU lowered the social wellbeing significantly. FoMO was similarly a negative factor for psychological (beta=-.22, p<.05) as well as social wellbeing (beta=-.21, p<.05). Interaction effects between all of these factors were tested but could not be found. All in all, quite a part of the variance can be explained only by these three factors: 16% of the variance of psychological wellbeing and 12% of the variance of social wellbeing.
Added Value
This study extends the knowledge about the factors that causes negative effects on the wellbeing of people in the digital age. Smartphones are so prominent and important nowadays that the fear of losing them can cause additional harm. The results show, that they serve as an important connection tool for social relationships, losing them creates stress and their exorbitant use lowers the wellbeing of people.