Relationship Between Childhood Physical Abuse, Neglect and Alexithymia and Mobile Phone Addiction in Adolescents

The popularity of smart phones not only brings great convenience to people's lives, but also makes people more dependent on them. This study aims to explore the causes of mobile phone addiction in adolescents and clarify its correlation with childhood abuse, neglect, and alexithymia.

A total of 684 middle school students from Jingzhou City in China were selected as research participants to investigate the degree of childhood psychological abuse, neglect and alexithymia by using the "Child Psychological Abuse and Neglect Scale (CPANS)," "Mobile Phone Addiction Tendency Scale (MPATS)," and "Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS)". According to survey results of mobile phone addiction, they were divided into the tendency group and the control group.

Students in the tendency group have shown higher scores in the dimensions of psychological abuse (scolding, intimidation and interference), neglect (emotional, education, physical/supervisory), compared to the control group. The total scores of psychological abuse and neglect were positively related to the total score of mobile phone addiction tendency. Students in the tendency group have shown higher scores in emotion identification difficulty, emotion description difficulty, extroversion thinking, and total scores of alexithymia than those of control group. The total score of alexithymia was positively related to the total score of mobile phone addiction tendency. Regression analysis has shown that childhood psychological abuse and neglect could significantly predict the mobile phone addiction status in students. Alexithymia could also significantly predict the mobile phone addiction status among the student sample.

Childhood abuse, neglect, and alexithymia were positively related to mobile phone addiction, and all of them had a significant regression-based predictive role regarding the mobile phone addiction in adolescents.