Why parental phubbing is at risk for adolescent mobile phone addiction: A serial mediating model

Building upon previous research establishing a positive association between parental phubbing and adolescent mobile phone addiction in the perspective of parent-child relationship, the present study, according to the Interaction of Person-Affect-Cognition-Execution (I-PACE) model of specific Internet-use disorders, tested a serial mediating model that explained how parental phubbing might accelerate adolescent mobile phone addiction through social anxiety and core self-evaluations (CSE). A sample of 471 junior high school students (282 girls and 189 boys; mean age 13.46 ± 1.11 years) completed measures of parental phubbing, social anxiety, CSE, and mobile phone addiction. The SEM analysis in AMOS 21.0 and the PROCESS macro in SPSS 22.0 were executed to test the mediation. The results indicated that social anxiety and CSE played multiple mediating roles in the association between parental phubbing and adolescent mobile phone addiction, with parental phubbing influencing adolescent mobile phone addiction through three mediation pathways (total mediation effect = 0.14, 95% CI = [0.09, 0.21]), which accounted for 48.28% of the total effect. The present study represented a step toward a better understanding of the psychological mechanisms underlying the link between parental phubbing and adolescent mobile phone addiction in an affective-cognitive-behavioral perspective.