Epidemic: Overall, this study lends support to the idea that smartphones can be beneficial for individuals, particularly during times when face-to-face interaction is limited

Did smartphones enhance or diminish well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic? Jennifer L. Heyman and Kostadin Kushlev. Front. Psychol., March 13 2023, Volume 14 - 2023 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1094196

Introduction: As smartphones have become increasingly integrated into people’s lives, researchers have attempted to answer whether they are beneficial or detrimental to well-being. Of particular interest to the current study is the role that smartphones played during the first year of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Methods: In an intensive longitudinal study, we explore how varying uses of smartphones relate to well-being using the Displacement-Interference-Complementarity framework.

Results: Consistent with pre-pandemic research, we show that people felt better, calmer, and more energetic when they used their phones more for complementary purposes (i.e., to access information, entertainment, and connection not otherwise available). In contrast to most pre-pandemic research, however, we find no evidence that any type of phone use predicted lower well-being during the pandemic.

Discussion: Overall, this study lends support to the idea that smartphones can be beneficial for individuals, particularly during times when face-to-face interaction is limited.

Discussion

We find that in a time of high social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic, people reaped the benefits of phone use for well-being without incurring the costs associated with phone use in pre-pandemic research. Specifically, consistent with pre-pandemic research (e.g., Kushlev et al., 2017), we find that people who used their phones in a complementary way—to access information, entertainment, and connection not otherwise available—felt better, calmer, and more energetic. Furthermore, we show that the same individuals felt better, calmer and more energetic on days when they used their phones for complementary purposes. Pre-pandemic research also shows, however, that phone use often undermines well-being, especially when it displaces (Lanaj et al., 2014; Hughes and Burke, 2018) or interferes with other activities (Dwyer et al., 2018; Kushlev and Dunn, 2019). In contrast, we found no evidence that phone interference or displacement predicted lower well-being during the initial stages of the pandemic. Thus, though the pre-pandemic literature has generally linked phone use and screentime with poorer well-being (Twenge and Campbell, 2019), we find that phone use during the pandemic was associated with higher, not lower well-being.

In line with previous research, phone complementarity was related to higher levels of well-being. That is, the greater affordance to information and opportunities provided by a phone was related to people having better moods, feeling calmer, and feeling more energetic. The ease of access to information and opportunities may have become even more important during the COVID-19 Pandemic when face-to-face social contact was severely limited, which significantly increased people’s level of stress (Halliburton et al., 2021). Therefore, using one’s phone to maintain existing relationships and gain access to information may have facilitated in maintaining some semblance of pre-pandemic life, thus predicting higher well-being.

People typically feel worse when their phone use displaces activities critical for well-being, such as sleep (Lanaj et al., 2014). We find little evidence that phone displacement undermined well-being during the pandemic. This may be because there were fewer positive activities that phone use could displace during the pandemic when social activities and events were discouraged. Presumably, however, people needed just as much sleep during the pandemic as they did pre-pandemic. As lockdowns disrupted routines, sleep–wake cycles were delayed during the pandemic (Sinha et al., 2020). Thus, in the relative lack of routine during the pandemic, phone use may have been less likely to displace sleep. Finally, as the pandemic introduced new stressors, phone displacement might have been beneficial for well-being by displacing more stressful activities (Kushlev and Leitao, 2020) and introducing a welcome source of distraction (Sheppes and Meiran, 2007; Quoidbach et al., 2010).

In contrast to pre-pandemic research, we found no evidence that phone interference predicted lower well-being. Just as with displacement, this lack of effect may be due to the relative lack of rewarding activities associated with social distancing. Indeed, most previous research on the interference effects of phones has shown that phones decrease well-being precisely by interfering with face-to-face social interactions (Dwyer et al., 2018; Kushlev and Dunn, 2019). In addition, during the COVID-19 Pandemic, phones may have also interfered with activities harmful to well-being, such as rumination. Overall, then, though null findings should be interpreted with caution, our evidence suggests that phone use may not have been as harmful during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Our findings were generally consistent with the Displacement–Interreference–Complementarity Framework: During a time of limited rewarding activities, complementary phone use continued to predict higher well-being, whereas well-documented phone interference and displacement effects were absent. According to the framework, however, at higher levels of social distancing, phone complementarity effects should have been stronger and phone displacement and interference effects should have been weaker. But we found little evidence that these effects depended on how much people socially distanced. Other research during the pandemic, however, showed that the benefits of online social interactions for well-being were greater when social distancing measures were more extreme (Marinucci et al., 2022). Specifically, online social interactions predicted lower distress only during the severe isolation stage in Italy that included prohibiting people from leaving their homes except for work and urgent health reasons. The social distancing measures that our participants in the United States experienced were much milder in comparison and participants, on average, reported high but not extreme levels of practicing social distancing (M = 3.12 on a scale from 1–not at all to 4–completely). Relatedly, people in our sample did not differ much in the extent to which they practiced social distancing, potentially preventing us from detecting moderating effects. Indeed, the extent to which people varied in their social distancing practices was low in this sample at both the within (SD = 0.58) and between (SD = 0.71) person levels.

This study had several important limitations that should be discussed. First, participants self-report on their levels of phone displacement, interference, and complementarity. However, people tend to misestimate the extent to which they use their phones. Future research should use more objective techniques, such as phone tracking, or peer reports in accordance with self-reports to gain a better understanding of how people are using their phones and the extent to which it relates to well-being. In addition, we used ad hoc measures of displacement, interference, and complementarity. Though theoretically justified, it is important for future research to develop validated measures of these constructs. For example, we measured phone displacement as the amount of time people spent on their phones in bed, the extent to which they used their phones more than they wanted to, and their total screentime. This crude measure of displacement fails to distinguish between screen time that displaces positive versus negative activities. As such, future research should utilize more precise measures of phone displacement, perhaps by explicitly asking people if they chose to use their phones over partaking in specific other activities. Furthermore, this study was conducted solely in the United States. However, other countries tend to use their phones in different ways (Langer et al., 2017) and have had different responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic (Kennedy et al., 2020). Therefore, future research should collect a more diverse sample to improve the generalizability of these results.

In sum, there is consistent evidence to suggest that using one’s phone for complementary purposes is associated with increases in well-being, as indicated by better mood, feeling calmer, and feeling more energetic, whereas spending more time on one’s phone and reporting that one’s phone interferes with daily life are generally not significantly associated with feeling good, calm, or energetic. Furthermore, we do not find consistent evidence that social distancing influences these associations. This study highlights the idea that phone use can be beneficial to individual’s well-being if it is used to complement their existing experiences.