Metacognition mediates the relationship between anxiety and smartphone addiction in university students

This study aims to explore the influencing factors of smartphone addiction among university students and further examine the mediating role of metacognition in the relationship between anxiety elements and smartphone addiction. Researchers conducted a structured questionnaire survey on 736 university students from three universities(Hunan University of Science and Technology, Anhui University of Finance & Economics, and Hunan Normal University), measuring their self-reported responses on six constructs: academic anxiety, social anxiety, future anxiety, positive metacognition, negative metacognition, and smartphone addiction. The study interpreted the non-compensatory and non-linear relationships between predictors and smartphone addiction by applying the Structural Equation Modeling - Artificial Neural Network (SEM-ANN) method. The findings revealed that academic anxiety had no significant impact on smartphone addiction, nor did social and future anxiety on positive metacognition and social anxiety on negative metacognition. Furthermore, positive metacognition did not play a mediating role between anxiety and smartphone addiction, nor did negative metacognition between social anxiety and smartphone addiction. The remaining hypotheses were validated. Additionally, according to the normalized importance derived from the multilayer perceptron, the study identified the most critical predictive factor as negative metacognition (100%), followed by future anxiety (49.19%), social anxiety (29.52%), positive metacognition (16.51%), and academic anxiety (10.73%). Lastly, the study presents theoretical and practical implications regarding smartphone addiction among university students.