中国科学院心理健康重点实验室知识库

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak was the first pandemic to occur in a fully globalized society. The aims of the study were to explore the state of problematic smartphone use (PSU) and its risk factors during this incident. A total of 77,211 college students were surveyed online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conducting latent profile analysis (LPA), we found the most support for a three-class model of subgroups: over-use group (17.3% of the sample), moderate-use group (54.8% of the sample), mild-use group (27.9% of the sample). The results of multinomial logistic regression show that college students who experienced an extreme negative impact from news reports were more likely to be included in the over-use group than in the mild-use group. These results providing insights that may help foster and develop appropriate and effective solutions to prevent PSU among college students during crises, such as reducing the coverage of negative news report.