Journal Archive

The rapid advancement in technology has made many devices, and a mobile phone is one of them (Nishad and Rana, 2016). Mobile phone is a useful tool to provide a lot of functions and pleasures in everyday life. Almost 95 percent of Americans own cell phones and 77 percent own smartphones(Shoukat, 2019). According to the Gallup Report, the number of smartphone subscribers in Korea was 93 percent out of total population in the country(GallupReport, 2018). Almost every Korean college student has a mobile phone by 98.8 percent(Ha, 2015).

Mobile phones make out lives easier but on the other hands it binds us. Too much dependency makes us "Mobile addictive"(Shoukat, 2019). Mobile phone dependence means not only obsessing with using mobile phone without a clear purpose, but also giving difficulties in the relationship with people around(Kim, 2013; Kim and Im, 2016). Block (2008) expressed concerns about problematic use of mobile phones such as behavioral or technological addiction and the effects on social and personal characteristics. There are indications that younger people have an even higher likelihood of using short message service(SMS) function and other features, resulting in increased exposure to emotional and social problems(Bianchi & Phillips, 2005; Seo et al., 2016). Mobile phone dependency negatively predicted attention and positively predicted depression affected social relationship with friends and both Korean language arts and mathematics achievement(Seo et al., 2016). Mobile phone addiction not only represents physical effects but also psychological and academic effects. Sleep deficit, anxiety, stress and depression are related to mobile phone addiction (Shoukat, 2019). According to Hakoma and Hakoyama(2011), female college students have high level of attachment to mobile phone than male students, indicating that females tend to maintain social relationships through mobile phone usage. On the other hand, there are researches to argue that boys tend to use more mobile phone than girls for playing games, shopping, or watching movies(Bisen and Deshpande, 2016). Jun(2019) found that self-esteem is positively related with mobile phone dependency and peer-alienation is negatively related with it. Woo(2013) found that parenting abuse and neglect affected on children's mobile phone dependency. In the study of Hur et al.(2015), depression aggression, attention, social withdrawal, and self-identity were found as the significant predictors of mobile phone dependency in adolescent. Even though there are studies to find out the gender difference of mobile phone dependency, there is no study about gender difference of emotional factors affecting mobile phone dependency of college students.

In this context, even though mobile phone is used widely in every aspect of life, there is a need to educate students to have strong control in their mind not to be depended psychologically. From the education perspective, there should be intervention programs or strategies to make educational strategies for decreasing mobile phone dependency. There are few researches exploring the relationship between mobile phone dependency and positive emotions for decreasing mobile phone dependency.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between positive emotions, negative emotions, and mobile phone dependency of college students and to identify the influencing factors on mobile phone dependence and its difference by gender.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the negative or positive emotional factors affecting mobile phone dependency of college students in South Korea based on the data of 1,220 students in the 7th year of KCYPS and its difference by gender. Self-identity, depression, and aggression affected the students' mobile phone dependency. The high level of self-identity and the lower level of depression and aggression showed low level of mobile phone dependency. In the male students, the depression was the first factor impacting on mobile phone dependency while in the female students, self-identity was important and secondly, aggression impacted on the mobile phone dependency.

As expected, mobile phone dependency showed a significant positive correlation with negative emotional factors (attention deficit, depression, aggression, and social withdrawal), and negatively correlated with positive emotional factors (self-esteem, ego-resilience, self-identity, and life satisfaction). This results give a lesson that in order to decrease mobile phone dependency of college students, positive emotional conditions are supporting their control in using mobile phone and their decision when to use or how to use it.

Out of positive or negative emotional factors, self-identity give highest effect on mobile phone dependency, followed by aggression and depression. The relationship of depression with mobile phone dependency has been studied in many studies (Seo et al., 2016; Kim, 2013; Kim & Im, 2014; Nishad & Rana, 2016; Shoukat, 2019).

In the case of male students, depression was the first factor in the regresssion model while self-identity was for female students. The self-identity was the common factor both in male and female students. Without self-identity, depression was an important factor in explaining male students' mobile phone dependency but aggression was an important factor in the case of female students. Therefore, it can be explained that in the case of male student, depression and loneliness make them depend on the mobile phone while aggression emotion of female students makes them depend on the mobile phone. In the case of women, more social media are used to maintain social relations and text messages are used as channels of social relations than men. The first factor was self-identity to female students. So using mobile phone is related to playing the self and making the self through mobile phone to female students while avoiding depression and loneliness is related to using mobile phone to male students. Self-identity is a positive emotion while depression is a negative emotion.

This result is consistent with the result of gender difference of mobile phone dependency by ANOVA as shown in Table 2. The girls' mobile dependency was higher than boys, which is consistent with the results of Hakoma and Hakoyama (2011), which argues that female students tend to maintain social relationship more than male students. Many researches revealed that female students have higher mobile dependency than boys (Kim, 2013; Kim and Im, 2014). In the study of Seo et al. (2016), mobile phone dependency of female students affected social relationship with friends but it was not the case of male students. This means that female students tend to have social relationship through mobile phone and mobile phone has a meaning as a channel to maintain social relationship for female students. As Bianchi and Phillips (2005) point out, younger female students use short message(SEM) service. In Korea, KakaoTalk is a popular SEM application to communicate with people in a easy way.

In this context, there is an implication for educational intervention for college students. Self-identity is considered to be a stable and coherent concept of oneself. According to the Webster dictionary, it is the quality that makes a person different from others (http://www.merriam-webster.com). In other words, students who know who they are, who they should be, and in which they are different from others, could have a power to control when or how to use mobile phones. Therefore, long-term strategy to make our students use mobile phone without depending much on it, should be related to education in their developmental stage of self-identity such as child-bearing of parents. In addition, the short-term intervention program in colleges for students should be provided to explore who they are or how to have strong self-identify. As college students prepare their careers, the educational programs or counseling programs to decrease mobile phone dependency could be related to career guidance programs.