Smartphone addiction, emotional coping strategies, and mental health symptoms in Chinese university students: a gender-based analysis.

BACKGROUND

Smartphone addiction is an increasing mental health concern among university students, yet the emotional coping correlates related to this association remain insufficiently understood. This issue is strategically important in Chinese higher education because university students represent a large digitally embedded population facing academic, developmental, and psychosocial pressures. This study examined the cross-sectional associations among elevated addiction-like smartphone use, emotional coping strategies, mental health symptoms, and gender among Chinese university students who met the SAS-SV screening threshold.

METHODS

Guided by stress-coping theory, this study used convenience recruitment followed by criterion-based screening. A total of 2,401 students from two public universities in China completed the Smartphone Addiction Scale-Short Version (SAS-SV) screening procedure, and 1,276 students who met the SAS-SV screening threshold were included in the final analysis. Elevated addiction-like smartphone use was assessed using the SAS-SV, mental health symptoms using the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K10), and emotional coping strategies using the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ), including reinterpretation strategy and suppression strategy. Direct and indirect statistical associations were tested using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). Measurement invariance was evaluated before gender-based multigroup analysis.

RESULTS

Smartphone addiction was positively associated with mental health symptoms (β = 0.748, t = 55.524, p < 0.001), suppression strategy (β = 0.357, t = 12.075, p < 0.001), and reinterpretation strategy (β = 0.214, t = 7.230, p < 0.001). Suppression strategy showed a positive indirect association between smartphone addiction and mental health symptoms, whereas reinterpretation strategy showed a negative indirect association. The model explained 66.2% of the variance in mental health symptoms. Gender did not significantly moderate the direct pathway, but the indirect pathway through reinterpretation strategy was significant among male students only.

CONCLUSION

The findings identify theoretically meaningful cross-sectional associations among smartphone addiction, emotional coping strategies, and mental health symptoms. Suppression and reinterpretation strategies showed different patterns of association with mental health symptoms, suggesting that emotional coping strategies may be relevant targets for future longitudinal and intervention research. As the data were collected at a single time point, the observed relationships cannot support causal inference and should instead be interpreted as associations.